Poetry for students, v. 30: presenting analysis, context, and criticism on commonly studied poetry. Volume 30 9781414421476, 1414421478, 9781414449517, 1414449518, 2782792792

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POETRY

for Students

Advisors Erik France: Adjunct Instructor of English, Macomb Community College, Warren, Michigan. B.A. and M.S.L.S. from University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Ph.D. from Temple University. Kate Hamill: Grade 12 English Teacher, Catonsville High School, Catonsville, Maryland. Joseph McGeary: English Teacher, Germantown Friends School, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Ph.D. in English from Duke University. Timothy Showalter: English Department Chair, Franklin High School, Reisterstown, Maryland. Certified teacher by the Maryland State Department of Education. Member of the National Council of Teachers of English. Amy Spade Silverman: English Department Chair, Kehillah Jewish High School, Palo Alto, California. Member of National Council of

Teachers of English (NCTE), Teachers and Writers, and NCTE Opinion Panel. Exam Reader, Advanced Placement Literature and Composition. Poet, published in North American Review, Nimrod, and Michigan Quarterly Review, among other publications. Jody Stefansson: Director of Boswell Library and Study Center and Upper School Learning Specialist, Polytechnic School, Pasadena, California. Board member, Children’s Literature Council of Southern California. Member of American Library Association, Association of Independent School Librarians, and Association of Educational Therapists. Laura Jean Waters: Certified School Library Media Specialist, Wilton High School, Wilton, Connecticut. B.A. from Fordham University; M.A. from Fairfield University.

POETRY

for Students Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Poetry

VOLUME 30

Poetry for Students, Volume 30

ª 2009 Gale, Cengage Learning

Project Editor: Sara Constantakis

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this work covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced, transmitted, stored, or used in any form or by any means graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including but not limited to photocopying, recording, scanning, digitizing, taping, Web distribution, information networks, or information storage and retrieval systems, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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Since this page cannot legibly accommodate all copyright notices, the acknowledgments constitute an extension of the copyright notice. For product information and technology assistance, contact us at Gale Customer Support, 1-800-877-4253. For permission to use material from this text or product, submit all requests online at www.cengage.com/permissions. Further permissions questions can be emailed to [email protected] While every effort has been made to ensure the reliability of the information presented in this publication, Gale, a part of Cengage Learning, does not guarantee the accuracy of the data contained herein. Gale accepts no payment for listing; and inclusion in the publication of any organization, agency, institution, publication, service, or individual does not imply endorsement of the editors or publisher. Errors brought to the attention of the publisher and verified to the satisfaction of the publisher will be corrected in future editions.

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ISBN-13: 978-1-4144-2147-6 ISBN-10: 1-4144-2147-8 ISSN 1094-7019 This title is also available as an e-book. ISBN-13: 978-1-4144-4951-7 ISBN-10: 1-4144-4951-8 Contact your Gale, a part of Cengage Learning sales representative for ordering information.

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Table of Contents ADVISORS

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JUST A FEW LINES ON A PAGE (by David J. Kelly) . . . . . INTRODUCTION

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LITERARY CHRONOLOGY .

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS CONTRIBUTORS .

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ANYONE LIVED IN A PRETTY HOW TOWN (by e. e. cummings) . . . . . . . . .

Author Biography Poem Summary . Themes . . . . Style . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism. . . . Sources . . . . Further Reading .

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THE CENTAUR (by May Swenson) .

Author Biography Poem Text . . . Poem Summary . Themes . . . . Style . . . . .

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Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism. . . . Sources . . . . Further Reading .

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. 41 42 42 44 46 47 49 49 59 60

FOLLOWER (by Seamus Heaney).

Author Biography Poem Summary . Themes . . . . Style . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism. . . . Sources . . . . Further Reading .

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FREEWAY 280 (by Lorna Dee Cervantes) .

Author Biography Poem Text . . . Poem Summary . Themes . . . . Style . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism. . . . Sources . . . . Further Reading .

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GOOD NIGHT, WILLIE LEE, I’LL SEE YOU IN THE MORNING (by Alice Walker) . . .

Author Biography Poem Summary . Themes . . . . Style . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism. . . . Sources . . . . Further Reading .

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I, TOO (by Langston Hughes) .

Author Biography Poem Text . . . Poem Summary . Themes . . . . Style . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism. . . . Sources . . . . Further Reading .

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. 77 78 79 79 81 82 84 84 95 96

. . 97 . . 98 . . 99 . . 99 . 100 . 103 . 103 . 105 . 106 . 116 . 117

A NOCTURNAL REVERIE (by Anne Finch).

Author Biography . . . . . . . Poem Text . . . . . . . . . .

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61 62 62 62 64 66 66 68 69 76 76

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118 119 119

Poem Summary . Themes . . . . Style . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism. . . . Sources . . . . Further Reading .

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120 121 122 124 125 126 136 136

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137 138 138 140 141 143 145 145 155 155

ORANGES(by Gary Soto) .

Author Biography Poem Summary . Themes . . . . Style . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism. . . . Sources . . . . Further Reading .

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THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS (by Wendell Berry) . . . . .

Author Biography Poem Text . . . Poem Summary . Themes . . . . Style . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism. . . . Sources . . . . Further Reading .

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157 157 159 159 160 162 162 164 164 174 174

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175 176 176 177 178 179 181 183 184 188 189

SLAM, DUNK, & HOOK (by Yusef Komunyakaa). .

Author Biography Poem Text . . . Poem Summary . Themes . . . . Style . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism. . . . Sources . . . . Further Reading .

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SUNSTONE (by Octavio Paz) .

Author Biography Poem Summary . Themes . . . . Style . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism. . . . Sources . . . . Further Reading .

P o e t r y

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190 191 192 195 196 196 198 199 208 208

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THE TAXI (by Amy Lowell) .

Author Biography Poem Text . . . Poem Summary . Themes . . . . Style . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism. . . . Sources . . . . Further Reading .

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THANATOPSIS (by William Cullen Bryant) .

Author Biography Poem Text . . . Poem Summary . Themes . . . . Style . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism. . . . Sources . . . . Further Reading .

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210 210 211 212 213 215 215 217 217 229 229

231 232 232 233 234 236 237 239 239 255 255

YE GOATHERD GODS (by SirPhilip Sidney) .

Author Biography Poem Summary . Themes . . . . Style . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism. . . . Sources . . . . Further Reading .

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YOUNG (by Anne Sexton) .

Author Biography Poem Summary . Themes . . . . Style . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism. . . . Sources . . . . Further Reading .

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C o n t e n t s

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278 279 279 281 283 283 285 286 295 296

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297 297 299 300 302 304 305 306 318 318

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319

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GLOSSARY OF LITERARY TERMS .

THE WALRUS AND THE CARPENTER (by Lewis Carroll) . . . . . . .

Author Biography Poem Text . . . Poem Summary . Themes . . . . Style . . . . . Historical Context Critical Overview . Criticism. . . . Sources . . . . Further Reading .

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CUMULATIVE AUTHOR/TITLE INDEX .

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CUMULATIVE NATIONALITY/ ETHNICITY INDEX . . . . SUBJECT/THEME INDEX

CUMULATIVE INDEX OF FIRST LINES . CUMULATIVE INDEX OF LAST LINES

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Just a Few Lines on a Page I have often thought that poets have the easiest job in the world. A poem, after all, is just a few lines on a page, usually not even extending margin to margin—how long would that take to write, about five minutes? Maybe ten at the most, if you wanted it to rhyme or have a repeating meter. Why, I could start in the morning and produce a book of poetry by dinnertime. But we all know that it isn’t that easy. Anyone can come up with enough words, but the poet’s job is about writing the right ones. The right words will change lives, making people see the world somewhat differently than they saw it just a few minutes earlier. The right words can make a reader who relies on the dictionary for meanings take a greater responsibility for his or her own personal understanding. A poem that is put on the page correctly can bear any amount of analysis, probing, defining, explaining, and interrogating, and something about it will still feel new the next time you read it. It would be fine with me if I could talk about poetry without using the word ‘‘magical,’’ because that word is overused these days to imply ‘‘a really good time,’’ often with a certain sweetness about it, and a lot of poetry is neither of these. But if you stop and think about magic—whether it brings to mind sorcery, witchcraft, or bunnies pulled from top hats—it always seems to involve stretching reality to produce a result greater than the sum of its parts and pulling unexpected results out of thin air. This book provides ample cases where a few

simple words conjure up whole worlds. We do not actually travel to different times and different cultures, but the poems get into our minds, they find what little we know about the places they are talking about, and then they make that little bit blossom into a bouquet of someone else’s life. Poets make us think we are following simple, specific events, but then they leave ideas in our heads that cannot be found on the printed page. Abracadabra. Sometimes when you finish a poem it doesn’t feel as if it has left any supernatural effect on you, like it did not have any more to say beyond the actual words that it used. This happens to everybody, but most often to inexperienced readers: regardless of what is often said about young people’s infinite capacity to be amazed, you have to understand what usually does happen, and what could have happened instead, if you are going to be moved by what someone has accomplished. In those cases in which you finish a poem with a ‘‘So what?’’ attitude, the information provided in Poetry for Students comes in handy. Readers can feel assured that the poems included here actually are potent magic, not just because a few (or a hundred or ten thousand) professors of literature say they are: they’re significant because they can withstand close inspection and still amaze the very same people who have just finished taking them apart and seeing how they work. Turn them inside out, and they will still be able to come alive, again and again. Poetry for

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Students gives readers of any age good practice in feeling the ways poems relate to both the reality of the time and place the poet lived in and the reality of our emotions. Practice is just another word for being a student. The information given here helps you understand the way to read poetry; what to look for, what to expect. With all of this in mind, I really don’t think I would actually like to have a poet’s job at all. There are too many skills involved, including precision, honesty, taste, courage, linguistics, passion, compassion, and the ability to keep all sorts of people entertained at once. And that is

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just what they do with one hand, while the other hand pulls some sort of trick that most of us will never fully understand. I can’t even pack all that I need for a weekend into one suitcase, so what would be my chances of stuffing so much life into a few lines? With all that Poetry for Students tells us about each poem, I am impressed that any poet can finish three or four poems a year. Read the inside stories of these poems, and you won’t be able to approach any poem in the same way you did before. David J. Kelly College of Lake County

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Introduction Purpose of the Book The purpose of Poetry for Students (PfS) is to provide readers with a guide to understanding, enjoying, and studying poems by giving them easy access to information about the work. Part of Gale’s ‘‘For Students’’ Literature line, PfS is specifically designed to meet the curricular needs of high school and undergraduate college students and their teachers, as well as the interests of general readers and researchers considering specific poems. While each volume contains entries on ‘‘classic’’ poems frequently studied in classrooms, there are also entries containing hard-to-find information on contemporary poems, including works by multicultural, international, and women poets. The information covered in each entry includes an introduction to the poem and the poem’s author; the actual poem text (if possible); a poem summary, to help readers unravel and understand the meaning of the poem; analysis of important themes in the poem; and an explanation of important literary techniques and movements as they are demonstrated in the poem. In addition to this material, which helps the readers analyze the poem itself, students are also provided with important information on the literary and historical background informing each work. This includes a historical context essay, a box comparing the time or place the poem was written to modern Western culture, a critical overview essay, and excerpts from critical essays

on the poem. A unique feature of PfS is a specially commissioned critical essay on each poem, targeted toward the student reader. To further aid the student in studying and enjoying each poem, information on media adaptations is provided (if available), as well as reading suggestions for works of fiction and nonfiction on similar themes and topics. Classroom aids include ideas for research papers and lists of critical sources that provide additional material on the poem.

Selection Criteria The titles for each volume of DfS are selected by surveying numerous sources on notable literary works and analyzing course curricula for various schools, school districts, and states. Some of the sources surveyed include: high school and undergraduate literature anthologies and textbooks; lists of award-winners, and recommended titles, including the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) list of best books for young adults. Input solicited from our expert advisory board—consisting of educators and librarians— guides us to maintain a mix of ‘‘classic’’ and contemporary literary works, a mix of challenging and engaging works (including genre titles that are commonly studied) appropriate for different age levels, and a mix of international, multicultural and women authors. These advisors also consult on each volume’s entry list, advising on which titles

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are most studied, most appropriate, and meet the broadest interests across secondary (grades 7–12) curricula and undergraduate literature studies.

How Each Entry Is Organized Each entry, or chapter, in PfS focuses on one poem. Each entry heading lists the full name of the poem, the author’s name, and the date of the poem’s publication. The following elements are contained in each entry: Introduction: a brief overview of the poem which provides information about its first appearance, its literary standing, any controversies surrounding the work, and major conflicts or themes within the work. Author Biography: this section includes basic facts about the poet’s life, and focuses on events and times in the author’s life that inspired the poem in question. Poem Text: when permission has been granted, the poem is reprinted, allowing for quick reference when reading the explication of the following section. Poem Summary: a description of the major events in the poem. Summaries are broken down with subheads that indicate the lines being discussed. Themes: a thorough overview of how the major topics, themes, and issues are addressed within the poem. Each theme discussed appears in a separate subhead and is easily accessed through the boldface entries in the Subject/ Theme Index. Style: this section addresses important style elements of the poem, such as form, meter, and rhyme scheme; important literary devices used, such as imagery, foreshadowing, and symbolism; and, if applicable, genres to which the work might have belonged, such as Gothicism or Romanticism. Literary terms are explained within the entry, but can also be found in the Glossary. Historical Context: this section outlines the social, political, and cultural climate in which the author lived and the poem was created. This section may include descriptions of related historical events, pertinent aspects of daily life in the culture, and the artistic and literary sensibilities of the time in which the work was written. If the poem is a historical work, information regarding the time in which the poem

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is set is also included. Each section is broken down with helpful subheads. Critical Overview: this section provides background on the critical reputation of the poem, including bannings or any other public controversies surrounding the work. For older works, this section includes a history of how the poem was first received and how perceptions of it may have changed over the years; for more recent poems, direct quotes from early reviews may also be included. Criticism: an essay commissioned by PfS which specifically deals with the poem and is written specifically for the student audience, as well as excerpts from previously published criticism on the work (if available). Sources: an alphabetical list of critical material quoted in the entry, with full bibliographical information. Further Reading: an alphabetical list of other critical sources which may prove useful for the student. Includes full bibliographical information and a brief annotation. In addition, each entry contains the following highlighted sections, set apart from the main text as sidebars: Media Adaptations: if available, a list of audio recordings as well as any film or television adaptations of the poem, including source information. Topics for Further Study: a list of potential study questions or research topics dealing with the poem. This section includes questions related to other disciplines the student may be studying, such as American history, world history, science, math, government, business, geography, economics, psychology, etc. Compare & Contrast: an ‘‘at-a-glance’’ comparison of the cultural and historical differences between the author’s time and culture and late twentieth century or early twenty-first century Western culture. This box includes pertinent parallels between the major scientific, political, and cultural movements of the time or place the poem was written, the time or place the poem was set (if a historical work), and modern Western culture. Works written after 1990 may not have this box. What Do I Read Next?: a list of works that might complement the featured poem or serve as a contrast to it. This includes works by the same author and others, works of fiction

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and nonfiction, and works from various genres, cultures, and eras.

Other Features PfS includes ‘‘Just a Few Lines on a Page,’’ a foreword by David J. Kelly, an adjunct professor of English, College of Lake County, Illinois. This essay provides a straightforward, unpretentious explanation of why poetry should be marveled at and how Poetry for Students can help teachers show students how to enrich their own reading experiences. A Cumulative Author/Title Index lists the authors and titles covered in each volume of the PfS series. A Cumulative Nationality/Ethnicity Index breaks down the authors and titles covered in each volume of the PfS series by nationality and ethnicity. A Subject/Theme Index, specific to each volume, provides easy reference for users who may be studying a particular subject or theme rather than a single work. Significant subjects from events to broad themes are included, and the entries pointing to the specific theme discussions in each entry are indicated in boldface. A Cumulative Index of First Lines (beginning in Vol. 10) provides easy reference for users who may be familiar with the first line of a poem but may not remember the actual title. A Cumulative Index of Last Lines (beginning in Vol. 10) provides easy reference for users who may be familiar with the last line of a poem but may not remember the actual title. Each entry may include illustrations, including photo of the author and other graphics related to the poem.

When writing papers, students who quote directly from any volume of Poetry for Students may use the following general forms. These examples are based on MLA style; teachers may request that students adhere to a different style, so the following examples may be adapted as needed. When citing text from PfS that is not attributed to a particular author (i.e., the Themes, Style, Historical Context sections, etc.), the following format should be used in the bibliography section:

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When quoting the specially commissioned essay from PfS (usually the first piece under the ‘‘Criticism’’ subhead), the following format should be used: Velie, Alan. Critical Essay on ‘‘Angle of Geese.’’ Poetry for Students. Ed. Marie Napierkowski and Mary Ruby. Vol. 2. Detroit: Gale, 1998. 7–10. When quoting a journal or newspaper essay that is reprinted in a volume of PfS, the following form may be used: Luscher, Robert M. ‘‘An Emersonian Context of Dickinson’s ‘The Soul Selects Her Own Society’.’’ ESQ: A Journal of American Renaissance 30.2 (1984): 111–16. Excerpted and reprinted in Poetry for Students. Ed. Marie Napierkowski and Mary Ruby. Vol. 1 Detroit: Gale, 1998. 266–69. When quoting material reprinted from a book that appears in a volume of PfS, the following form may be used: Mootry, Maria K. ‘‘‘Tell It Slant’: Disguise and Discovery as Revisionist Poetic Discourse in ‘The Bean Eaters’.’’ A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry and Fiction. Ed. Maria K. Mootry and Gary Smith. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. 177–80, 191. Excerpted and reprinted in Poetry for Students. Ed. Marie Napierkowski and Mary Ruby. Vol. 2. Detroit: Gale, 1998. 22–24.

We Welcome Your Suggestions

Citing Poetry for Students

P o e t r y

‘‘Angle of Geese.’’ Poetry for Students. Ed. Marie Napierkowski and Mary Ruby. Vol. 2. Detroit: Gale, 1998. 8–9.

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The editorial staff of Poetry for Students welcomes your comments and ideas. Readers who wish to suggest poems to appear in future volumes, or who have other suggestions, are cordially invited to contact the editor. You may contact the editor via E-mail at: [email protected]. Or write to the editor at: Editor, Poetry for Students Gale 27500 Drake Road Farmington Hills, MI 48331-3535

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Literary Chronology 1554: Sir Philip Sidney is born on November 30, in Kent, England.

1898: Lewis Carroll dies on January 14, in England.

1586: Sir Philip Sidney dies of an infection from a battle injury on October 17, in Anhelm, the Netherlands.

1902: Langston Hughes is born James Langston Hughes on February 1, in Joplin, Missouri.

1593: Sir Philip Sidney’s poem ‘‘Ye Goatherd Gods’’ is published. 1661: Anne Finch is born on April 12, in England. 1713: Anne Finch’s poem ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie’’ is published. 1720: Anne Finch dies of failed health on August 5, in England. 1794: William Cullen Bryant is born on November 3, in Cummington, Massachusetts. 1821: William Cullen Bryant’s poem ‘‘Thanatopsis’’ is published. 1832: Lewis Carroll is born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson on January 27, in Daresbury, Cheshire, England. 1871: Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, which contains ‘‘The Walrus and the Carpenter,’’ is published.

1913: May Swenson is born Anna Thilda May Swenson on May 28, in Logan, Utah. 1914: Amy Lowell’s poem ‘‘The Taxi’’ is published. 1914: Octavio Paz is born on March 31, in Mexico City, Mexico. 1925: Amy Lowell dies from a cerebral hemorrhage on May 12, in Brookline, Massachusetts. 1926: Amy Lowell is a awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for What’s O’Clock. 1926: Langston Hughes’s poem ‘‘I, Too’’ is published. 1928: Anne Sexton is born Anne Gray Harvey on November 9, in Newton, Massachusetts. 1934: Wendell Berry is born on August 5, in Henry County, Kentucky. 1939: Seamus Heaney is born on April 13, in County Derry, Northern Ireland.

1874: Amy Lowell is born on February 9, in Brookline, Massachusetts.

1940: e. e. cummings’s poem ‘‘anyone lived in a pretty how town’’ is published.

1878: William Cullen Bryant dies on June 12, in New York, New York.

1944: Alice Walker is born on February 9, in Eatonton, Georgia.

1894: e. e. cummings is born Edward Estlin Cummings on October 14, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

1947: Yusef Komunyakaa is born on April 29, in Bogalusa, Louisiana. 1952: Gary Soto is born on April 12, in Fresno, CA.

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1954: Lorna Dee Cervantes is born on August 6, in San Francisco, California. 1956: May Swenson’s poem ‘‘The Centaur’’ is published. 1957: Octavio Paz’s Sunstone is published. 1962: Anne Sexton’s poem ‘‘Young’’ is published. 1962: e. e. cummings dies on September 3, in North Conway, New Hampshire. 1966: Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘‘Follower’’ is published. 1967: Anne Sexton is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Live or Die.

1975: Alice Walker’s poem ‘‘Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning’’ is published. 1981: Lorna Dee Cervantes’s poem ‘‘Freeway 280’’ is published. 1983: Alice Walker is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel The Color Purple. 1985: Gary Soto’s poem ‘‘Oranges’’ is published. 1989: May Swenson dies of a heart attack on December 4, in Ocean View, Delaware. 1990: Octavio Paz is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. 1991: Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem ‘‘Slam, Dunk, & Hook’’ is published.

1967: Langston Hughes dies of congestive heart failure on May 22, in New York, New York.

1994: Yusef Komunyakaa is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Neon Vernacular.

1968: Wendell Berry’s poem ‘‘The Peace of Wild Things’’ is published.

1995: Seamus Heaney is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

1974: Anne Sexton commits suicide on October 4, in Weston, Massachusetts.

1998: Octavio Paz dies of spinal cancer in Mexico City, Mexico, on April 19.

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Acknowledgments The editors wish to thank the copyright holders of the excerpted criticism included in this volume and the permissions managers of many book and magazine publishing companies for assisting us in securing reproduction rights. We are also grateful to the staffs of the Detroit Public Library, the Library of Congress, the University of Detroit Mercy Library, Wayne State University Purdy/ Kresge Library Complex, and the University of Michigan Libraries for making their resources available to us. Following is a list of the copyright holders who have granted us permission to reproduce material in this volume of PfS. Every effort has been made to trace copyright, but if omissions have been made, please let us know. COPYRIGHTED EXCERPTS IN PfS, VOLUME 30, WERE REPRODUCED FROM THE FOLLOWING PERIODICALS: American Book Review, v. 4, July-August, 1982. Reproduced by permission.—American Literature, v. 31, January, 1960. Copyright Ó 1960, copyright renewed, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the publisher.—American Poetry Review, v. 23, SeptemberOctober, 1994; v. 29, March-April, 2000. All reproduced by permission of the author.—Black American Literature Forum, v. 20, winter, 1986. Copyright Ó 1986 Indiana State University. Reproduced by permission.—Black Issues Book Review, v. 5, March-April, 2003. Copyright Ó 2003 by Cox, Matthews & Associates. Reproduced

by permission.—Callaloo, summer, 1988; v. 25, autumn, 2002. Copyright Ó 1988, 1990, 2002 The Johns Hopkins University Press. All reproduced by permission.—Children’s Literature, v. 31, 2003. Copyright Ó 2003 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reproduced by permission.— Latin American Literary Review, v. 5, 1977. Copyright Ó 1977 Latin American Literary Review. Reproduced by permission of the publisher.— English Language Notes, v. 20, December, 1982. Copyright Ó 1982, Regents of the University of Colorado. Reproduced by permission.—Explicator, v. 63, winter, 2005; v. 64, summer, 2006. Copyright Ó 2005, 2006 by Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation. All reproduced with permission of the Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation, published by Heldref Publications, 1319 18th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20036-1802—Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, v. 11, July-August, 2004. Copyright Ó 2004 Gay & Lesbian Review, Inc. Reproduced by permission.—Hollins Critic, v. XXI, June, 1984. Copyright Ó 1984 by Hollins College. Reproduced by permission.—Kenyon Review, v. XVI, summer, 1994 for ‘‘A Mysterious and Lavish Power: How Things Continue to Take Place in the Work of May Swenson’’ by Sue Russell. Reproduced by permission of the author.—MELUS, v. 17, autumn, 19911992; v. 18, fall, 1993. Copyright MELUS: The Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, 1991-1992, 1993, 2007. All reproduced by permission.—Midwest Quarterly, v. 45,

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autumn, 2003. Copyright Ó 2003 by The Midwest Quarterly, Pittsburgh State University. Reproduced by permission.—New Criterion, v. 26, September, 2007 for ‘‘The Absence of Amy Lowell’’ by Carl E. Rollyson, Jr. Copyright Ó 2007 Foundation for Cultural Review. Reproduced by permission of the author.—New England Quarterly, v. 43, March, 1970; v. 53, December, 1980; v. 56, December, 1983. Copyright Ó 1970, 1980, 1983 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All reproduced by permission of The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA—New Republic, v. 138, May 19, 1958. Copyright Ó 1958, renewed 1986, The New Republic, Inc. Reproduced by permission of The New Republic.—New Southerner, January-February, 2006. Reprinted with permission from New Southerner Magazine.— Parnassus: Poetry in Review, v. 12/13, 1985 for ‘‘Poets of Weird Abundance’’ by Diane Middlebrook. Copyright Ó 1985 Poetry in Review Foundation, NY. Reproduced by permission of the publisher and the author.—Poetry, v. 187, December, 2005 for ‘‘Eight Takes’’ by David Orr. Copyright Ó 2005 Modern Poetry Association. Reproduced by permission of the author.—Review of English Studies, v. 46, August, 1995 for ‘‘Anne Finch and Her Poetry: A Critical Biography’’ by Harriett Devine Jump. Copyright Ó 1995 Oxford University Press. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press, conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., and the author.— Southern Cultures, v. 7, fall, 2001. Copyright Ó 2001 University of North Carolina Press. Reproduced by permission.—Southern Review, v. 29, spring, 1993 for ‘‘What Binds Us to This World’’ by Marilyn Nelson Waniek. Copyright Ó 1993 Louisiana State University. Reproduced by permission of the author.—Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, v. 22, winter, 1982; v. 31, summer, 1991. Copyright Ó 1982, 1991 The Johns Hopkins

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University Press. All reproduced by permission.— Studies in the Literary Imagination, v. 11, spring, 1978; v. 35, spring, 2002. Copyright Ó 1978, 2002 Department of English, Georgia State University. All reproduced by permission.—Twentieth Century Literature, v. 31, winter, 1985; v. 46, fall, 2000. Copyright Ó 1985, 2000, Hofstra University Press. All reproduced by permission.—Women’s Review of Books, v. 9, December, 1991; v. 12, January, 1995. Copyright Ó 1991, 1995 Old City Publishing, Inc. All reproduced by permission. COPYRIGHTED EXCERPTS IN PfS, VOLUME 30, WERE REPRODUCED FROM THE FOLLOWING BOOKS: Berry, Wendell. From Collected Poems 19571982. North Point Press, 1984. Copyright Ó 1964, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1973, 1977, 1980, 1982, 1984 by Wendell Berry. Reproduced by permission.— Hughes, Langston. From ‘‘I, Too,’’ in Langston Hughes: Poems. Edited by David Roessel. Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. Copyright Ó 1999 by David Campbell Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Harold Ober Associates Incorporated. —Komunyakaa, Yusef. From Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems. Wesleyan University Press, 2001. Copyright Ó 2001 by Yusef Komunyakaa. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Wesleyan University Press.—Orr, Tamra. From Gary Soto. Rosen Central, 2005. Copyright Ó 2005 by The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.—Quiroga, Jose´. From Understanding Octavio Paz. University of South Carolina Press, 1999. Copyright Ó 1999 University of South Carolina. Reproduced by permission.—Swenson, May. From The Complete Poems to Solve. Macmillan Publishing Company, 1993. Reproduced by permission of the Literary Estate of May Swenson.

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Contributors Bryan Aubrey: Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English. Entries on ‘‘The Peace of Wild Things’’ and ‘‘Thanatopsis.’’ Original essays on ‘‘The Peace of Wild Things’’ and ‘‘Thanatopsis.’’ Jennifer Bussey: Bussey has a master’s degree in interdisciplinary studies and a bachelor’s degree in English literature. She is an independent writer specializing in literature. Entries on ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie’’ and ‘‘Ye Goatherd Gods.’’ Original essays on ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie’’ and ‘‘Ye Goatherd Gods.’’ Sheldon Goldfarb: Goldfarb is a specialist in Victorian literature who has published nonfiction books as well as a novel for young adults. Entry on ‘‘The Centaur.’’ Original essay on ‘‘The Centaur.’’ Joyce M. Hart: Hart is a published author and freelance writer. Entries on ‘‘Freeway 280’’ and ‘‘The Taxi.’’ Original essays on ‘‘Freeway 280’’ and ‘‘The Taxi.’’ Neil Heims: Heims is a freelance writer and the author or editor of over two dozen books on literary subjects. Entry on ‘‘The Walrus and the Carpenter.’’ Original essay on ‘‘The Walrus and the Carpenter.’’ Diane Andrews Henningfeld: Henningfeld is a college professor and literary critic who

writes widely on contemporary literature. Entry on ‘‘Slam, Dunk, & Hook.’’ Original essay on ‘‘Slam, Dunk, & Hook.’’ Sheri Metzger Karmiol: Karmiol has a doctorate in English Renaissance literature. She teaches literature and drama at the University of New Mexico, and she is also a professional writer and the author of several reference texts on poetry and drama. Entry on ‘‘I, Too.’’ Original essay on ‘‘I, Too.’’ David Kelly: David Kelly is a writer and an instructor of creative writing and literature. Entry on ‘‘Oranges.’’ Original essay on ‘‘Oranges.’’ Bradley A. Skeen: Skeen is a classics professor. Entries on ‘‘Follower’’ and ‘‘Young.’’ Original essays on ‘‘Follower‘‘ and ‘‘Young.’’ Leah Tieger: Tieger is a freelance writer and editor. Entries on ‘‘anyone lived in a pretty how town’’ and ‘‘Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning.’’ Original essays on ‘‘anyone lived in a pretty how town’’ and ‘‘Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning.’’ Carol Ullman: Ullmann is a freelance writer and editor. Entry on Sunstone. Original essay on Sunstone.

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anyone lived in a pretty how town The poem ‘‘anyone lived in a pretty how town’’ is one of the most anthologized works by one of America’s most anthologized poets, e. e. cummings. Cummings, one of America’s leading modernist poets, was known for his experimentation with capitalization, punctuation, and syntax (the sequence of arranged words) in his work. By playing with these elements of language, cummings challenged the very nature and meaning of language, often resulting in new and surprising meanings. Additionally, cummings rarely titled his poems, perhaps wishing to avoid giving them any added meaning outside of their text. Thus, although his poems were often numbered, they became known by their first lines, as is the case with ‘‘anyone lived in a pretty how town.’’ The poem is also characteristic of cummings’s style, and due to the syntactical acrobatics in ‘‘anyone lived in a pretty how town,’’ the poem can be read in several ways. On one level, it is about the inner self and the individual in conventional (i.e., conformist) society. On another level, it is a love story between a figure named Noone (No one) and a figure named Anyone. On yet another level, the poem is about the passage of time.

E. E. CUMMINGS 1940

First published as ‘‘No. 29’’ in 1940 in cummings’s collection 50 Poems, ‘‘anyone lived in a pretty how town’’ is widely available in anthologies and on the Internet. A recent anthology that features the poem is Modern American Poetry, edited by B. Rajan and published by Meyer Press in 2007.

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Cummings’s father actively petitioned for his son’s release from prison, but when cummings returned to the United States in early 1918, he was almost immediately drafted into the army. World War I, however, was drawing to a close, and cummings never saw any military action in Europe as a soldier. He was released from duty that November. Cummings spent the next several years writing and publishing. He lived in Paris from 1921 to 1923, writing poetry and working on his paintings. Cummings’s first collection of poems, Tulips and Chimneys (1923), already contained the elements that would become typical of his poetic style. Cummings published several collections of poetry throughout the 1920s, including XLI Poems (1925) and is 5 (1926).

e. e. cummings (AP Images)

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Edward Estlin Cummings, who wrote under the name e. e. cummings, was born on October 14, 1894, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His mother was Rebecca Haswell, and his father, Edward Cummings, was a Harvard professor and later a well-known Unitarian minister. As a child, cummings wrote stories and poetry, and he also drew and painted. He was educated at Harvard University, earning an A.B. in 1915 and an M.A. the following year. While a student at Harvard, cummings was introduced to the poetry of Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, and he began to emulate the modernist aesthetic, publishing poems in the Harvard Monthly. In 1917, shortly after college, cummings joined the Norton Harjes Ambulance Corps of the American Red Cross, which allowed him to work as a medic, rather than as a soldier, during World War I. However, while stationed in France, cummings was imprisoned from September to December in a French military prison. This was brought about by his friendship with the suspected spy William Slater Brown, and by his pacifist beliefs. Cummings’s first book, The Enormous Room (1922), provides a fictional version of his imprisonment.

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Upon his return to the United States in 1923, cummings moved to New York City. He married Elaine Orr on March 19, 1924. Their daughter, Nancy, was born that December, and the couple divorced that very month. Cummings’s first play, Him, was published a few years later (in 1927) and it was staged in 1928. The work was dedicated to Anne Barton, whom cummings married on May 1, 1929. The couple soon separated (in 1932). Cummings then met Marion Morehouse, and he spent the rest of his life in a common law marriage with her. Thus, despite a decade filled with romantic turmoil and his father’s death, cummings spent the 1930s publishing several volumes of poetry, an untitled collection of stories, a ballet, and the journal Eimi (1933). His first artistic exhibition was also held in New York City in 1931. Prints of this exhibition were collected and published as CIOPW that same year. Furthermore, the poems cummings produced during this period were his most experimental, playing with the visual representation of words upon the page and even going so far as to rearrange the spelling of individual words. His Collected Poems was published in 1938. Though cummings continued to exhibit his artwork and publish poetry and other works throughout the 1940s, his poetic style had solidified, and his heretofore prolific output began to slow. Indeed, he only published two poetry collections during this decade, including 50 Poems (1940), in which ‘‘anyone lived in a pretty how town’’ first appeared. By the 1950s, cummings began to receive recognition for his overall body of work. He held the post of Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard from 1952 to 1953, and the lectures that he gave there were collected

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and published as I: Six Nonlectures in 1953. Cummings’s comprehensive collected poems were published as Poems 1923–1954 in 1954. The following year, cummings was awarded a National Book Award special citation for the collection. Cummings spent the final years of his life traveling throughout the country and giving lectures. He died at his summer home in North Conway, New Hampshire, on September 3, 1962. His remains are buried in Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston.

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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS 

A short film adaptation, given the same title as the poem, was directed by George Lucas in 1967. The independent film was written by Lucas and Paul Golding.

POEM SUMMARY Cummings’s ‘‘anyone lived in a pretty how town’’ consists of nine four-line stanzas. The poem is predominantly written in tetrameter, or lines consisting of four feet (each foot represents one stressed syllable and one unstressed syllable).

Stanza 1 The first line of the poem, which is also the poem’s title, introduces the character of Anyone and the picturesque village that he lives in. The next line mentions the sound of the bells that can often be heard in the town. Presumably this refers to church bells, which announce holidays, weddings, funerals, and other events that mark the passage of time and of individual lives. The third line lists the seasons, again underscoring the passage of time. The stanza’s final line, which is a bit nonsensical, is meant to represent Anyone’s exploits as he goes through life.

Stanza 2 The poem then mentions the other townspeople, stating that they do not concern themselves with Anyone. Instead, they go about conducting their small lives. The final line of this stanza mentions celestial bodies and precipitation, natural phenomena that, like the seasons, mark time as it passes.

Stanza 3 In the third stanza, a minority of the youngsters in the town have an inkling that Noone (who is first introduced in the final line of the stanza) is falling in love with Anyone. The children of the town, however, become less aware of those around them and more self-involved as they mature into adulthood. In the third line of the stanza, the list of the four seasons is repeated. Yet the order in which they appear has been changed. This change further emphasizes time and its passage.

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Stanza 4 Mentioning trees and their leaves, as if to indicate that it is autumn (the first season mentioned in the list in the previous stanza), Noone’s love for Anyone is expounded upon. She is happy when he is happy and sad when he is sad. The third line of the stanza perhaps indicates that the season has changed from autumn to winter. The stanza’s final line once again underscores Noone’s love for Anyone; anything related to him is of the utmost importance to her.

Stanza 5 Other people in the town, the Someones and the Everyones, wed and live together. They experience the happy and the sad moments of life. They rise in the morning and go to bed at night. They live out their lives in the rhythmic (and somewhat banal manner) in which lives are generally lived. The fourth and final line of this stanza implies that the townspeople die in much the same way as they have lived; i.e., as a matter of course.

Stanza 6 Stanza 6 opens with the aforementioned list of celestial bodies. The order, like the repeated list of the seasons, has been rearranged. In this instance, the changed order suggests that time has moved from day to night. This is reinforced by the second line of the stanza and the mention of winter. Only the winter (i.e., the passage of time) can address why children grow up and are no longer able to see the small mysteries of life around them. The second line of the first stanza, which refers to the bells heard throughout the town, is repeated. Indeed, this stanza mentions

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children as they grow up and then links this to the church bells that ring to signify the events that mark the rhythms of life, such as birth, marriage, and death.

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

Stanza 7 Anyone dies and Noone mourns him. She, too, eventually dies, which is implied by the statement that they are buried beside each other. In a nod to the fact that life goes on, Anyone and Noone are interred by townspeople who live hectic lives and have little (if any) time to stop and reflect upon the burial. In the stanza’s final line, time crawls by in small increments.

Stanza 8 As time passes, Anyone and Noone live in their deaths, a sort of slumber that is filled with dreams. Their bodies decompose and fuel the soil and the coming of spring.

Stanza 9 The townspeople are likened to the sounds of the church bells, and the list of seasons repeats itself in yet another variation on their order. The townspeople are born and they die. They live the same lives and this cycle repeats itself endlessly. In the final line, the celestial bodies are listed once more, though they retain the order in which they first appeared in the poem’s second stanza.

Scanning a poem (identifying its rhythm and marking out the stressed and unstressed syllables) is a difficult but rewarding task. Research how to scan a poem, and then scan ‘‘anyone lived in a pretty how town.’’ Write an essay in which you discuss how scanning the poem has enhanced your understanding of its themes, meaning, and structure.  Study the lives and work of T. S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein, cummings’s contemporaries. Give a class presentation in which you provide a biographical overview of all three writers and examine one poem by each of them. How are the poems similar? How are they different?  Cummings, like many writers of his generation, often lived and worked in Paris. Study the 1920s and the historical context that may have contributed to the creation of an expatriate community of American writers in Paris. Write a report on your findings.  Write a poem mimicking the style, themes, or form of ‘‘anyone lived in a pretty how town’’ and read your poem aloud to the class. Be prepared to discuss how your poem resembles the original. 

THEMES Passage of Time One of the most prominent themes in ‘‘anyone lived in a pretty how town’’ is that of the passage of time. This is communicated in the thricerepeated lists of seasons and of celestial bodies coupled with the rain. With one exception, each time the lists are repeated, the order in which they appear has been rearranged. Used to tell time long before the invention of clocks and calendars, the seasons, heavenly bodies, and weather are ancient signifiers of time as it passes. Additionally, there are two references to children growing up, one in stanza 3 and one in stanza 6. There are two references to the bells ringing through the town, and these are presumably church bells. Church bells ring for holidays, births, marriages, and deaths; in other words, all of the major events

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that punctuate a life as it progresses. The other, less straightforward, instances that capture the passage of time are the life and death of Anyone and Noone, and also of the townspeople, who live predictable and cyclic lives.

Mortality The theme of mortality is linked to the theme of time as it passes. Death is the final outcome of the passage of time and also the event that most clearly measures time. In the poem, mortality is linked to the seasons (specifically winter) and to the heavens (specifically night, via the stars). These are the phenomena mentioned shortly before Anyone’s death is announced. Death as it

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is envisioned in the poem is not complete extinction, but rather a dream-filled slumber. In contrast to this pleasant image, life is busy and hectic; the townspeople rush about, attending to their daily business. This is particularly shown in stanza 5. The townspeople marry as a matter of course; they feel joy and sadness as a matter of course; they sleep and rise in the morning, little more than automatons. The life described is one without depth or reflection (as is indicated by the children who forget to notice the world as they age). Yet death is described as just the opposite; it seems that the dead are in a sense more alive than the living.

Individualism and Conformity In ‘‘anyone lived in a pretty how town,’’ Anyone is an individual in a sea of conformity. Anyone sings and dances, but the townspeople do not heed him or care about him. Indeed, they are too busy with their own lives to even notice him. Only the children, who will soon be too old and too busy to notice him as well, are able to see that Noone is falling in love with Anyone. In the midst of the love story of Anyone and Noone, the town life continues unaffected. The routine marriages of the townspeople, when contrasted to the love that Noone has for Anyone, seem small and unremarkable. Even the poem’s speaker does not seem to care about Anyone; he mentions Anyone’s death in an offhanded, and even flippant, manner. There are no details or dates attached to Anyone’s death, only the mention that it happened at some point. Noone is the only person who mourns Anyone, though no one is left to mourn her when she dies. The two are buried by rushed townspeople who do not care for them, or for anyone but themselves and their affairs, for that matter. Whereas Anyone is an individual, the townspeople represent conformity. This is reinforced by the poem’s final stanza, in which the people of the town are likened to the ringing bells of the church, i.e., little more than the background noise marking time as it passes. These uniform people come and go as steadily as the weather and the movement of the heavenly bodies. Yet, in death, they are like Anyone and Noone, sleeping in a dream-filled death. Given this reading, Anyone and Noone’s names are highly ironic. Anyone’s symbolic name makes him at once an individual and everyone.

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Sun, moon, stars (Jupiter Images)

STYLE Repetition There are thirty-six lines in ‘‘anyone lived in a pretty how town,’’ and eight of them are repetitions of or variants on a previous line. These repeated lines have to do with the list of the seasons, the list of celestial bodies and precipitation, and the bells ringing throughout the town. All of these repeated lines are related to the passage of time and therefore establish one of the poem’s primary themes. Aside from these straightforward repetitions, there are two mentions of children forgetting things as they mature, and of the dream-filled slumber that describes death. The word by is also repeated several times throughout the poem, especially in the second half. The word is used to join similar or identical things, which is a repetition in and of itself. A popular phrase that demonstrates this usage is ‘‘one by one,’’ though cummings uses far less conventional constructions in his poem.

Alliteration and Assonance Alliteration, the repetition of initial consonant sounds in words or syllables placed close together,

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occurs in much of the poem, as several lines use words that begin with the same letter. Line 4 is comprised of eight words, three of which begin with the letter d and four of which begin with h. In line 7, which is also eight words long, four words begin with th, and two begin with s. One could list almost endlessly the instances of alliteration that run throughout the poem. Assonance, the repetition of similar vowel sounds, is even more integral to the poem’s construction. As Explicator contributor B. J. Hunt points out, repeated variations of o sounds (both long and short) and ow sounds are numerous. Even the poem’s title contains examples of this particular assonance. Alliteration and assonance, after all, are just a more specific or stylized form of repetition.

Rhyme Rhyme in all forms runs through this poem, which is more stylized than it at first appears to be. End rhymes (those occurring at the end of a line) appear in the first two lines of stanzas 1 through 4 and stanzas 8 through 9. Additionally, slant rhymes (involving words that almost rhyme) occur in the last two lines of stanza 2 and stanza 9. Internal rhymes (rhymes occurring within the same line) appear in slant form in lines 15 and 20. Because the rhymes in the poem occur with a sporadic regularity, ‘‘anyone lived in a pretty how town’’ avoids sounding too predictable (too sing-song), yet it also is stylized enough to sound mindfully poetic, elevated to a style that exists beyond normal speech.

Syntax Syntactical inversion, the style for which cummings first became famous (or infamous), is evident throughout ‘‘anyone lived in a pretty how town.’’ Even the title is an example of this inversion; its meaning could just as easily be communicated with the statement ‘‘Anyone lived in a pretty town.’’ Without ‘‘how,’’ however, the playful rhythm of the poem is lost. Brian Docherty, writing in American Poetry: The Modernist Ideal, observes that the second line of the poem, a disordered description of the sound of bells ringing in the town, could easily be reordered into a coherent sentence as well, simply by rearranging the words around the subject and the verb. Such unusual arrangements are evident throughout, particularly in line 6, which is perhaps the most straightforwardly disordered line in the poem. According to Docherty, cummings also uses words of all stripes as nouns. This is particularly

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the case in lines 4, 7, 10, 18, 20, and 35. These devices open up the poem for multiple interpretations while reinforcing its rhythmic form.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT Modernism Modernism is an artistic movement that began in the early twentieth century, reached its zenith during the 1920 and 1930s (coincidentally cummings’s most prolific years), and remained a prominent movement well into the middle of the century. Modernism was prominent in both literature and the visual arts, beginning in Europe and later making its way to the United States. Several cultural upheavals gave rise to the movement. In nineteenth-century Western Europe, the dominant ideal exalted the progress of humanity over the concerns of the individual. But this began to change early in the twentieth century, in no small part accelerated by the unprecedented carnage of World War I. Arguably the world’s first truly mechanized war, World War I caused artists to question the values of patriotism and politics, and they looked instead to the experience of the individual as a singular being (rather than a representative or part of mankind at large). This theme was also motivated by the question of what it meant to be a human in an increasingly mechanized world. Psychological writings by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung were also influential, as were philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche (although Nietzsche lived in an earlier period, his last work appearing in 1888) and Jean-Paul Sartre. This paradigm shift in cultural and social values had widespread implications, resulting in new and varying approaches to the perception of reality, and thus to new and exciting modes of expression. For instance, authors such as James Joyce and William Faulkner were pioneers of the stream-of-consciousness style of writing. Writers such as Gertrude Stein and cummings challenged the very structure of language. Painters such as Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall produced canvases that turned accepted modes of visual expression on their heads. Other influential modernist writers include Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Franz Kafka, and many more. The movement was so widespread and continuous that it is perhaps better described as an umbrella to several smaller movements, including imagism, surrealism, and cubism.

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COMPARE & CONTRAST 



1940s: Before telephone use is common, towns rely on the ringing of church bells as a form of mass communication. Until 1945, in the United States, less than half of all households have phones installed. Today: Telephones and mobile phones are ubiquitous, as are other forms of mass communication. Modern churches are rarely built with bells. 1940s: The era of modernist poetry, in which poets challenged traditional poetic language, themes, and structures, is just coming to a close.

Transcendentalism Though cummings’s work was thoroughly modernist in its style, it was often transcendental in its themes and content. Transcendentalism was particularly widespread in New England from 1830 to 1850. Given that cummings was born in New England in the late nineteenth century, it is extremely likely that he was familiar with transcendental writings and themes. Like modernism, transcendentalism was largely concerned with the experience of the individual, though from a far more spiritual angle. Transcendentalists believed in the innate divinity of the natural world and of humankind. Thus, they stressed the individual’s insight and intuition as opposed to logical thought or organized religion. Furthermore, the idea that man was essentially divine was a stark departure from the reigning Calvinist philosophy of the day, which posited belief in original sin and man’s inherently sinful nature. Prominent transcendental writers include Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW The poem ‘‘anyone lived in a pretty how town’’ is one of cummings’s more accessible and popular works, and this is likely why it is so often

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Today: An important poetic movement of the day is New Formalism. The movement entails a return to traditional poetic forms and structures. 

1940s: The United States enters World War II following the Japanese attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941. Today: The United States is fighting two wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq. These wars were initiated in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, in New York City and Washington D.C.

anthologized. As critics note, the poem is representative of almost all of the characteristics that embody cummings’s signature poetic style. One such characteristic is the serious themes that lie beneath what at first appears to be nonsense, both in form and content. For instance, Explicator contributor B. J. Hunt states that the poem ‘‘rolls across the tongue like a preschool song. . . . Masked, however, is life’s monotony and death’s certainty . . . everyone dies.’’ Hunt also comments that whenever the sing-song lilt of the poem is disturbed, the disturbance ‘‘accentuate[s] death’s poignant certainty by [the] negation of rhythmic harmony.’’ Discussing another of cummings’s characteristic devices in American Poetry: The Modernist Ideal, Brian Docherty indicates that cummings’s syntactical acrobatics are particularly apt in regards to the human experience of the space-time continuum. Through cummings’s play on word order, readers are ‘‘reminded that the normal linear word order in English locks our thinking about time and space into a mode which post-Einsteinian science has shown to be nonvalid, however convenient for mundane use.’’ More general critical responses to cummings’s poetry have largely centered on the question of whether or not it should be seen as famous or infamous. While critics almost unanimously agree that cummings’s groundbreaking work forever

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changed the course of American poetry, there is considerable contention as to whether or not his poetry had any other merit to speak of. In an essay written just three years after the publication of 50 Poems (in which ‘‘anyone lived in a pretty how town’’ first appeared), American Literature critic John Arthos argues that cummings’s work is valuable in its own right. He ‘‘should not be allowed to fall from sight, or to be remembered only as one of the wild experimenters who came along after the last war [World War I]. For he represents even now, in a more terrible war [World War II], something that is valid and sweet in the human spirit, and something profound and strong—in short, beauty.’’ Sadly, as the former United States poet laureate Billy Collins observes in his 2005 Slate essay, Arthos’s admonitions have gone largely unheeded. Collins remarks that ‘‘a few of [cummings’s] poems . . . are kept breathing due to the life-support systems of anthologies and textbooks, but except for these and a few other signature numbers, the body of his work has fallen into relative neglect.’’ Collins concludes that ‘‘no list of major 20th-century poets can do without him, yet his poems spend nearly all of their time in the darkness of closed books, not in the light of the window or the reading lamp.’’

CRITICISM

WHAT DO I READ NEXT? 

Cummings’s 50 Poems (1940), which includes ‘‘anyone lived in a pretty how town,’’ contains some of the poet’s more accessible and (relatively) straightforward poems. Written after cummings had established his signature style, the collection is a fine example of the poet’s maturing work.



For a look at cummings’s more visual poems (those with meaning largely derived from typographical arrangement), see his first collection of poetry, Tulips and Chimneys (1923).



World War I directly affected the modernist movement, and Robert H. Zieger’s America’s Great War: World War I and the American Experience (2001) provides insight on the social and cultural effects of the war.



Gertrude Stein was a contemporary of cummings’s, and she also experimented with syntax in her work. Like cummings, the value of her writing outside of its modernist context is somewhat contested. The Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein (1990) is an extensive introduction to her work.

Leah Tieger Tieger is a freelance writer and editor. In this essay, she places ‘‘anyone lived in a pretty how town’’ in the context of cummings’s entire poetic output and argues that the poem is more closely aligned with transcendentalism than modernism. Several critics comment that cummings’s writings are transcendental in their overarching themes of individuality and spirituality (the very touchstones of transcendental thought). Certainly, ‘‘anyone lived in a pretty how town’’ is no exception. The poem’s themes of the passing of time and of mortality mirror the transcendentalist ethos of spirituality. Its focus on the individual (whose significance is as lost to society as it is to death) represents the transcendental disgust for conformist society. Furthermore, the exalted love between Noone and Anyone also reinforces a transcendental philosophy. Love, like the seasons, is a driving force in the poem. Anyone and Noone love each other as they age. Their love is set apart from the ordinary marriages of the other

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townspeople, who marry as mundanely as they live. Certainly, the love between Anyone and Noone becomes the means through which they are further distinguished as individuals. Noone laughs when Anyone is happy and she cries when he is sad. Their love is so magical it can only be seen by children (who lose their individuality as they become entrenched in, and consumed by, society). Later, Noone and Anyone are hastily buried beside each other, and life simply goes on as it always has. Noone and Anyone did not matter to society when they were alive, and they do not matter when they are dead. Yet their love both does and does not matter in the face of death. For instance, while it does not matter to the townspeople, as the bodies of Noone and Anyone become one with the soil their spirits live on in their love, a

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IF NATURE IS EVIDENCE OF GOD, AND IF THE NATURAL PHENOMENA OF SEASONS, CELESTIAL BODIES, AND PRECIPITATION ARE USED TO COMMUNICATE THE PASSAGE OF TIME AND ULTIMATELY OF MORTALITY, ONE COULD THEN CONCLUDE THAT MORTALITY ALSO SERVES AS PROOF OF GOD’S EXISTENCE.’’

phenomenon that is indicated by line 32. Yet even when they are alive, the exalted love between Anyone and Noone is almost entirely spiritual. The one physical embodiment of the romance between them is the kiss that Noone bestows on Anyone’s face after he has died. This almost complete absence of physical love should be seen in the context of cummings’s development as a poet. Rushworth M. Kidder, writing in E. E. Cummings: An Introduction to the Poetry, comments on Cummings’s earlier love poems, which are far more erotic than ‘‘anyone lived in a pretty how town.’’ Kidder makes the following observation about cummings’s erotic poems: In an odd and inverted way, these poems are pleas for purity and balance, stifled cries for a higher vision of human love coming out of a wilderness of sensual indulgence. . . . These assertions that flesh is at worst gross and at best slightly unsatisfactory prepare the way of his later metaphysic: to show the repulsiveness of carnality is to prove the need for its opposite.

In other words, the presentation of baser physicality underscores the presence of spiritual love in the form of its absence. As cummings matured as an artist, this spirituality became ever more present. The transcendental undertones of the exalted love between Anyone and Noone are further explained by Brian Docherty in American Poetry: The Modernist Ideal. Docherty states that ‘‘cummings’s love for the natural world and those free individuals who are able to love and be loved, makes him a true heir of [Ralph Waldo] Emerson.’’ Clearly, this statement can be applied to Anyone and Noone, the only named characters in the poem who are undeniably ‘‘free individuals . . . able

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to love and be loved.’’ (Notably, Docherty adds that cummings ‘‘represents the end of the New England Transcendentalist tradition.’’) Kidder goes a step further, positing that the bulk of cummings’s work is about love. ‘‘If Cummings has one subject, that is it.’’ Tracing the evolution of cummings’s poetry from an initial exploration of erotic love followed by ‘‘a sometimes amorphous phenomenon seasoned by a not entirely unselfish lust,’’ Kidder states that in his later work, love ‘‘has come to be a purified and radiant idea, unentangled with flesh and worlds, the agent of the highest transcendence.’’ Kidder concludes that this ‘‘is not far, as poem after poem has hinted, from the Christian conception of love as God.’’ Love, however, is not the only transcendental motif in ‘‘anyone lived in a pretty how town.’’ Nature, which also features in most transcendental themes, is represented in the seasons, the snow, the rain, and the moon (which are repeated throughout the poem in varying order to represent time as it passes). An integral part of transcendentalist thought, nature is believed to be the proof of God’s existence. Yet although the poem is less concerned with God’s existence than with Anyone’s existence, nature is still the driving force of the town and its people; they live, love, and die amidst the passing seasons and the ringing of church bells. If nature is evidence of God, and if the natural phenomena of seasons, celestial bodies, and precipitation are used to communicate the passage of time and ultimately of mortality, one could then conclude that mortality also serves as proof of God’s existence. Certainly, the conception of mortality as a dream-filled sleep (a nod toward an afterlife of some sort) gives this idea some validity. This argument is also bolstered by Kidder, who writes that cummings’s work gives credence ‘‘to intuition, to the sensibilities, to the human capacity for responding to metaphysical reality in ways that are beyond the rational.’’ These very principles are demonstrated in ‘‘anyone lived in a pretty how town.’’ One example is the children who notice the love between Anyone and Noone, but are no longer able to see that love as they mature into adults. Another is the description of death as something akin to a dream. Death is described in terms that make it a far more interesting plane of existence than the rhythmic and mundane lives that are lived by the townspeople. The townspeople, of course, are integral to an understanding of cummings’s transcendental

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philosophy. The Someones and the Everyones of the town wed and live together. They experience the happy and the sad moments of life. They rise in the morning and go to bed at night. They live out their lives in the rhythmic (and somewhat banal) manner in which lives are generally lived. They also die in much the same way as they have lived, i.e., as a rather dull matter of course. Earlier in his career, cummings coined the term ‘‘mostpeople’’ as a means of expressing his contempt for conformity (another fundamental principle of transcendentalism). Jenny Penberthy, writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, describes ‘‘mostpeople’’ as those who ‘‘follow orders’’ and ‘‘do their duty,’’ as opposed to ‘‘the individual [who] is true to himself.’’ Cummings explained the term himself in the preface to his 1938 volume Collected Poems. In an excerpt from that preface (quoted in Penberthy), cummings states: The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople—it’s no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike. Mostpeople have less in common with ourselves than the squareroot of minusone. You and I are human beings; mostpeople are snobs. . . . Life, for mostpeople, simply isn’t. Take the socalled standard of living. What do mostpeople mean by ‘living’? They don’t mean living.

The form of ‘‘anyone lived in a pretty how town’’ also underscores the poem’s transcendental content. Cummings, notably, was a painter, and one could argue that his more visual poems were less inspired by the literary zeitgeist (mode of the day) than the visual arts of the day (such as Cubism). Cummings’s visual poems are characterized by broken lines, a lack of punctuation or capitalization, words joined together, as well as words, letters, or punctuation arranged typographically so as to form a discernible image. They are less modernist poetry than they are pieces of modernist art. Because ‘‘anyone lived in a pretty how town’’ is decidedly not a visual poem in this sense, it divorces itself from cummings’s more modernist undertakings; thus its transcendental leanings become even more clear. Other poems by cummings written in this vein include ‘‘maggie and milly and molly and may,’’‘‘my father moved through dooms of love,’’ and ‘‘the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished soul’’ (among many, many others). This interesting phenomenon regarding form and content in cummings’s work is remarked upon by Penberthy, who observes that, ‘‘in general, he reserved the sonnet or metrical forms for his more serious poems which embody a complex,

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transcendent vision. The looser, more experimental poems, on the other hand, aim to communicate concrete sensations and perceptions in all their existential immediacy.’’ This observation has also been made by Norman Friedman in E. E. Cummings: The Growth of a Writer (quoted in Kidder), who states that ‘‘there is an organic relation between the poet’s technique and his purposes.’’ Friedman adds that cummings typically ‘‘uses metrical stanzas for his more ‘serious’ poems, and reserves his experiments by and large for his free verse embodiments of satire, comedy, and description.’’ As Kidder notes, ‘‘where life for the early Cummings was a matter of birth, maturity, and decay, for the late Cummings it consists in birth, maturity, and transcendence.’’ It would seem that ‘‘anyone lived in a pretty how town’’ lies right on the cusp of this transition. It contains none of the earthy or erotic subject matter, satire, or experimental typography of the earlier works. Yet it is not quite as overtly transcendental as his later works, which were typically shorter, more concise meditations. Nevertheless, ‘‘anyone lived in a pretty how town’’ is squarely grounded in the traditions of transcendentalism. It is equally grounded in cummings’s progression as an artist. Source: Leah Tieger, Critical Essay on ‘‘anyone lived in a pretty how town,’’ in Poetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2009.

B. J. Hunt In the following essay, Hunt discusses the masking of monotony and death in cummings’s ‘‘anyone lived in a pretty how town.’’ E. E. Cummings’s ‘‘Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town’’ rolls across the tongue like a preschool song. On one hand, the playful rhythm and sound complement nature’s sequences where life cycles rotate throughout the nine stanzas like a merrygo-round, life on a proverbial fast-paced playground. Masked, however, is life’s monotony and death’s certainty as the four-line stanzas, mostly tetrameters that mirror the four seasons, lead, perhaps, to an immutable certainty: everyone dies. The poem opens with light, harmonious double dactyls in line 1: ‘‘anyone lived in a pretty how town.’’ Playful rhythm continues in subsequent dactyls such as ‘‘women and men (both little and small)’’ (5), ‘‘someones married their everyones’’ (17), and ‘‘many bells down’’ (2, 24) that stream into trochees like ‘‘pretty’’ (1), ‘‘summer autumn winter’’ (3), and iambs like ‘‘with up so floating’’

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(2, 24). Bells, which often announce important events in small-town communities such as weddings or funerals, seemingly sway in varied meter that carries a carefree rising and falling as if the ‘‘many bells’’ celebrate life or joyfully acknowledge ‘‘anyone,’’ a youthful ‘‘he’’ who ‘‘sang’’ and ‘‘danced’’ (4) in the ‘‘spring’’ of life. But ‘‘spring,’’ the only monosyllabic foot in line 3, harbors the undertones of isolation and mortality that begin to emerge. By line 24, which repeats line 3, the bells seemingly toll for death, a solitary journey. Stanza 6 further suggests the human winter in ‘‘stars’’ (21) and especially ‘‘snow’’ (22), which often suggest a metaphorical season of death. Monosyllabic feet such as ‘‘sun moon stars rain’’ (8), also break the easygoing pace to emphasize certain maturity for ‘‘anyone’’ toward the summer (‘‘sun’’) of life, which occurs without significance to others who ‘‘cared not [ . . . ] at all’’ (6) as if to focus on human isolation in the midst of humanity. Only the children in the third stanza notice that ‘‘anyone’’ and ‘‘noone’’ (12), the female persona, fall in love. As ‘‘someones married their everyones’’ (17), the poem increasingly hints of monotony and life’s insignificance. Interestingly, line 12 contains three feet rather than four. The trimeter reinforces ‘‘autumn’’ (11), often considered the metaphorical golden years of life as time like the line runs short. Line 23 contains two falling dactyls anchored around a rising anapest that gives a seesaw effect reflective, perhaps, of the children’s inevitable maturity and constant cycles of birth and death. The line’s extra foot creates contrast between ‘‘remember’’ and the fact that everyone ‘‘forget[s]’’ or is forgotten in time. The ‘‘snow’’ (22) suggests unavoidable death, which occurs in stanza seven as seasons continuously churn. As ‘‘anyone’’ and ‘‘noone’’ die, notably, the seasons turn perpetually to ‘‘april’’ (31) or spring, and back to ‘‘summer’’ (34) or ‘‘sun’’ (34) suggestive, perhaps, that in the midst of life death exist—yet, life goes on. Also, the poem is highly alliterative and euphonic. Assonance dominates with variations on vowel sounds, especially o as in ow, which occurs three times in the first stanza alone: ‘‘how town’’ and ‘‘down.’’ The sound is repeated in ‘‘down’’ (10), ‘‘now’’ (13), and ‘‘how’’ (23). Long os flow throughout in words like ‘‘so,’’ ‘‘floating,’’ ‘‘both,’’ ‘‘sowed,’’ ‘‘noone,’’ ‘‘hope,’’ ‘‘snow,’’ and ‘‘sowing’’ (1, 5, 7, 12, 19, 22, 24, 22, 35). A sustained ooo courses along in words such as ‘‘moon,’’ ‘‘few,’’ ‘‘grew,’’ and ‘‘stooped’’ (8, 9, 10, 21, 26, 36). The

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THUS HE COMBINES IMAGES WHICH ARE SO UNRELATED TO EACH OTHER AS TO BE ALMOST UNIMAGES MERELY BECAUSE OF THEIR ASSOCIATIONAL QUALITY’’

resulting ow-oh-oo seems playful, yet mournful as they drench the poem in a sense of unhindered progression toward sorrow and death. They might be happy ohs or sad oh nos. Rhymes, internal, end, and slant, hide the immutable force, time that orders human life. ‘‘By,’’ ‘‘by,’’ and ‘‘cried,’’ for instance, seem inconsequential until the reader slows on cacophonous gutturals like ir in ‘‘bird’’ and ‘‘stir’’ in stanza 4, while ‘‘grief’’ or sadness, underscored by ‘‘still,’’ imply that by and by grief awaits. ‘‘Deep’’ and ‘‘sleep’’ (29, 30), one of six end rhymes which normally render pleasure, also guide the reader’s attention to inescapable death. Some lines end in slant rhymes like ‘‘same’’ ‘‘rain’’ (7, 8), ‘‘guess’’ ‘‘face’’ (25, 26) and accentuate death’s poignant certainty by negation of rhythmic harmony. Source: B. J. Hunt, ‘‘Cummings’s ‘Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town,’’’ in Explicator, Vol. 64, No. 4, 2006, p. 226.

Philip Green In the following ‘‘unessay,’’ Green mimics cummings’s style while commenting on the poet’s use of unrelated images and problematic punctuation. this unessay is for you and me and is not for mostpeople. This unessay is about culturepoetryandlove (not really love it is more about unnotlove) and most people do not understand culturepoetryandunnotlove but you and I will understand it. we! this unessay is also about communication which is like flowers and moons only not really whom flowers and moons are only for feel (ing o isn’t that nice), but communication is more like razor-blades and electric eggbeaters; it is made for use It is utilitarianand so at least partially rational and so unfortunately is any po (iloveyou) em. poems have writers which is what eecummings is but they also have readers which is what you and i who are not unpeople

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are what you and i and eecummings being not unwhich have in common is, we, use language, which is also what communication is really except smoke-signals even which are also language. what you and i and cummings have in common even more than roses is also not only language but also the Same Language ie english; a frenchman would have a hell of a time reading cummings’ poetry unless he happened to speak english which unfortunately most frenchmen do not [and that would not help more than littlemuch even if he did for many of cummings’ poems] (and the really go go good ones like somewhere I have never travelled or my love thy head or the great advantage of being alive are not really very unsame from any other uninpoems) because most of them are not very anything but tricks and games saying unthings nearly or things that leave you with a vague feeling of feeling (my red red rose) goodness which is often not nearly poetry but unorganized sound or emotion like if i wrote I love you i Love you i lOve you i loVe you i lovE you i love You six times.) What eecummings is doing withah-POETRY!? in his own syntactical way is really allthetime the same thing which I shall describe to wit . . . he is recreating his emotional experiences of looking at treesmoonsrainsnowlovemotherskythighetc or maybe even his dreams and he wants you to too and see how undead and thingish they are . . . what gets in his way is paper and Language which is why: once feeling is described it is not feeling any more but it is anaboutfeeling which is a farfar differentthing and you do not feel it but the telling about it in words which have logical relation ships topreposition eachadjective othersubstantive and that must therefore be intelligent in some way or one might say (or might not) rational (lyordered) and which are as i said not pure feeling which is immediate and emotional and unconventionally ordered. eecummings is trying to get away from unliveness which destroys his feelings so he if i may quote someone else frEEEs language, that is he destroys ITS order until he thinks it looks (and this is where the problem) the same as HIS feeling, and/or (comes in) he uses words which are things with both denotations and connotations purely for their connotative which is usually

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emotional effect. ! Thus he combines images which are so unrelated to each other as to be almost unimages merely because of their associational quality which gives you the feeling he wants as in Cambridge ladies living in furnished souls or not even the rain has such small hands, and in which the feeling is even en Hanced because of the shock of such un nopersoned juxtaposition. He does this very well and it is why many of his poems are extremely unbad and rather o I’m going to go out and kiss the lips of the treesish at least if you are a romantic and an o how I love things which ought to be loved and an I shall lie with the warm body of the earthish person which i am and you are and all disinunnonhumans are. How! and similarly is what else he does to us with his syntactics, in two ways: first with normalwordorder and pun, ctu! ation? which is most ordinary when he merely reverses it or leaves it out; he does often much more fiendish, things? Second with the parts of speech which he mixes up like the muchness of summer rain until all, being being, are one with each other, this is not nocuous when he simply forgets capitaL letters and periods and other unbeautiful whatnots that aren’t the snow soaking into the belly of the Earth or what have you;? after the first shock which was in the 1920’s anyway you don’t notice because these things are not either logical or illogical in themselfish’s being only conveniences like a woman in a bar And he is often (SUCCESS) full, mixing up which’s and whom’s and all the King’s words. As an example take (as the evening takes the sun) for instance a line like down shall go which and up come who—which conveys although i must admit only after a little thought the idea that people which are really am are better than things which are really not which is one of the things this poem—what if a much of a which of a wind, which is another line that very admirably does what he wants it to, is emphasizes—is about However, in most of his poetry if you use the criterion of merely counting noses like any anaesthetizedimpersonalunbeing mathematician which don’t get down and sssss UCK the good earth, or mud when it rains, it fails. Of course there are some people though I will not admit for this occasion that

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they are not unpeople who think or perhaps i should say feel differentl-y. lionel trilling for instance who is a critic of some renoun says and in the fullness of my heart i quote ‘‘The parts of speech that we all thought were merely ‘modifiers’ or ‘relatives’ or ‘dependents’ have learned from him their full, free existence.’’ this, I am afraid I must sub (which is a prefix meaning under and appears to make no sense placed before) mit, is so much bal! der dAS h. in a life which consists mostly of ironclad conventions, language is about the most ironcladandconventional and the last stand at the barricades will do you no good thing there is. And even though mr cummings and by implication mr trilling are in their anarchic goodness trying to free Language they cannot because Language is like Poland perpetually enslaved. The fact of the matter is that language (L) is a strict form logically constructed being indeed as mr carnap or mr hemple would be the first to tell you constructed on the same principles as any mathematical order Of course it is, not; necessary that we perceive it as such all the time, particularly in poetry because words and syntax develop their own conventions within a (convention) that form a short of sort-hand for quicker and more perhaps poetic understanding, as when eec writes that time is a tree this life one leaf which as stated is not strictly true but which convinces the casual reader because the image is self-consistent and is a concept which has been made unstartling (enough b)y previous usage.

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d up through the ages and inculcated in all readers of poetry and poets except apparently mr cummings and mr trilling. What eec is doing is to take words ordinarily denotative and make them connotative like fragile which he uses to qualify almost everything under the sun not to mention the sun, or also to invent new connotations for words ordinarily used in a connotative sense. What happens too often is that the burden of meaning he puts on a

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denotative or conventionally connotative and therefore weakord is too heavy; the word snapS and we are left with no meaning at all or an incoherent meaning as if he were stroking your back, it feels so nice but can you tell me about it? The weight referred to is that of mr cummings’ private experience and perceptions which of necessity mustin their original state be unshared by the reader who has had his own experience and has found the triangular why of a dream is not to quote mr cummings blue and is furthermore not triangular and is indeed not why. Of course i am not saying that eec must only use words which a particular reader understands in context—the, line, we draw for permissibly avoiding unlivemassman convention is a pragmatic one at best but unfortunately eec is prone to overstep it, even at its most tolerant, as in the foregoing quotation which may sound very pleasant but poetry is unhappily not music it is impossible to elucidate the meaning or even the feeling of the phrase. The poet must grant the reader some rapport even if he doesn’t like us because we’re not undead or else his poetry becomes purely subjectivistic which is fine for writing on your tablecloth but not necessarily so good for printing in a public place unless you happen to be an anarchist, which I am not and you are probably not. Second, we must refer to the similar but much more destructive problem of cummings’ punc (tuation)? and typography which is to say that he allows some his poems

but i must repeat the emphasis is still on the word convention ‘‘ ’’, which is inevitable though reasonably limitable by any good poet for two reasons. The first of these is that any word or groupofwords comes or come to us with a history and tradition much like the German folk or the english parliament, which has been soaKE

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the printed to use the word loosely page, with little marks that used to be commas and similar unthings stuck in unGodly places, Mr cummings is in this regard working on the theory of direct communication i assume that i referred to earlier, which is that he is desir-ous of avoiding the stultification of prescribed form which will hinder the direct expression of his experiences. So that if he wants let us say to emphasize some metaphor about water dribbling on to the sidewalk for instance why he simply lets the words d r i

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in little pieces from here to eternity you are still going to read it as floating eventually if you die in the attempt and your effort to do this creates a battle between the reader and the poem which has nothing to do with the usual tension of unprose. It is just a damnuisance.

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on the whole of course cummings has written a lot of doublemuchunugly poems which are very nice to read because he knows lots of not beautiful words which are unthings but words about beautiful things, and when i see the word spring whee with a few other such words surrounding it i want to go out and

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e p a g e . or to describe a kite he makes some kind of arrangement which is supposed to suggest a kite but is not a kite and cannot even really suggest a kite because a kite is a thing is unwords and exists in space not in time which is what words exist in; and because words are not things but are things ABOUT things or symbols and are experienced not directly but at one remove from experience. They are descriptions and a poem too in a description and since comprehension of descriptions occurs through the use of the intelligence the description itself must be intelligent even if this is unwhich and notmost. The trouble with cummings’ poems which are really unpoems may be stated also psychologically; cummings breaks up w/o(r)-ds and chops them into pieces and mis: punctuate, s and extraCAPITALIZES and half-parenthesizes and (all to emphasize what he thinks are the feelings inherent in ordinary boring words like anonymous which has an US in it which is i suppose you and i making love. But this unphotographicminded reader reads one word at a time and must therefore rearrange as he goes along because words will be words and demand that they be perceived in the same oldreary way that they have been for the last few hundred years, i. e. one at a time and oneafteranother and in one (1) piece and even spelled bourgeoiscorrectly. If i scrawl f, l

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e on the grass and sniff dandelions which is a very nice thing to do especially in springtime. But most of these poems are ones in which the images have at least something to do with anyone or anything and the words are written one after another. As a matter of fact which is a subtle way of saying that my next sentence will probably be incorrect, those unconventional oddities of eec’s which are good, such as what if a much of a which of a wind, are good precisely because they combine the best features of innovation with convention being in the most respected ladyyourlipsaredivineandiloveyou tradition: they are in a given context logical (he’d never forgive me for saying this) changes, structured intelligently and (your pardon ee) rationally; in short they make (o world o death) sensE. Source: Philip Green, ‘‘an unessay on ee cuMmingS,’’ in New Republic, Vol. 138, No. 20, May 19, 1958, pp. 24–26.

R. P. Blackmur In the following excerpt, Blackmur discusses the ‘‘typographical peculiarities’’ in cummings’s poetry. In his four books of verse, his play, and the autobiographical Enormous Room, Mr. Cummings has amassed a special vocabulary and has developed from it a special use of language which these notes are intended to analyse and make explicit. Critics have commonly said, when they understood Mr. Cummings’ vocabulary at all, that he has enriched the language with a new idiom; had they been further interested in the uses of language, they would no doubt have said that he had added to the general sensibility of his time. Certainly his work has had many imitators. Young poets have found it easy to

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HE BELIEVES HE KNOWS WHAT HE KNOWS, AND NO DOUBT HE DOES. BUT HE ALSO BELIEVES, APPARENTLY, THAT THE WORDS WHICH HE ENCOURAGES MOST VIVIDLY TO MIND ARE THOSE MOST PRECISELY FITTED TO PUT HIS POEM ON PAPER.’’

adopt the attitudes from which Mr. Cummings has written, just as they often adopt the superficial attitudes of Swinburne and Keats. The curious thing about Mr. Cummings’ influence is that his imitators have been able to emulate as well as ape him; which is not so frequently the case with the influence of Swinburne and Keats. . . . There is one attitude towards Mr. Cummings’ language which has deceived those who hold it. The typographical peculiarities of his verse have caught and irritated public attention. Excessive hyphenation of single words, the use of lower case ‘‘i,’’ the breaking of lines, the insertion of punctuation between the letters of a word, and so on, will have a possible critical importance to the textual scholarship of the future; but extensive consideration of these peculiarities to-day has very little importance, carries almost no reference to the meaning of the poems. Mr. Cummings’ experiments in typography merely extend the theory of notation by adding to the number, not to the kind, of conventions the reader must bear in mind, and are dangerous only because since their uses cannot readily be defined, they often obscure rather than clarify the exact meaning. No doubt the continued practice of such notation would produce a set of well-ordered conventions susceptible of general use. At present the practice can only be ‘‘allowed for,’’ recognized in the particular instance, felt, and forgotten: as the diacritical marks in the dictionary are forgotten once the sound of the word has been learned. The poem, after all, only takes wing on the page, it persists in the ear. . . . Any poetry which does not consider itself as much of an art and having the same responsibilities to the consumer as the arts of silversmithing

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or cobbling shoes—any such poetry is likely to do little more than rehearse a waking dream. Dreams are everywhere ominous and full of meaning; and why should they not be? They hold the images of the secret self, and to the initiate dreamer betray the nerve of life at every turn, not through any effort to do so, or because of any inherited regimen, but simply because they cannot help it. Dreams are like that—to the dreamer the maximal limit of experience. As it happens, dreams employ words and pictorial images to fill out their flux with a veil of substance. Pictures are natural to everyone, and words, because they are prevalent, seem common and inherently sensible. Hence, both picture and word, and then with a little stretching of the fancy the substance of the dream itself, seem expressible just as they occur— as things created, as the very flux of life. Mr. Cummings’ poems are often nothing more than the report of just such dreams. He believes he knows what he knows, and no doubt he does. But he also believes, apparently, that the words which he encourages most vividly to mind are those most precisely fitted to put his poem on paper. He transfers the indubitable magic of his private musings from the cell of his mind, where it is honest incantation, to the realm of poetry. Here he forgets that poetry, so far as it takes a permanent form, is written and is meant to be read, and that it cannot be a mere private musing. Merely because his private fancy furnishes his liveliest images, is the worst reason for assuming that this private fancy will be approximately experienced by the reader or even indicated on the printed page. But it is unfair to limit this description to Mr. Cummings; indeed, so limited, it is not even a description of Mr. Cummings. Take the Oxford Book of English Verse, or any anthology of poems equally well known, and turn from the poems printed therein of such widely separated poets as Surrey, Crashaw, Marvell, Burns, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Swinburne, to the collected works of these poets respectively. Does not the description of Mr. Cummings’ mind at work given above apply nearly as well to the bulk of this poetry as to that of Mr. Cummings, at least on the senses’ first immersion? The anthology poems being well known are conceived to be understood, to be definitely intelligible, and to have, without inspection, a precise meaning. The descent upon the collected poems of all or of any one of these authors is by and large a descent into tenuity. Most of their work, most of any poet’s work, with half a dozen

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exceptions, is tenuous and vague, private exercises or public playthings of a soul in verse. So far as he is able, the reader struggles to reach the concrete, the solid, the definite; he must have these qualities, or their counterparts among the realm of the spirit, before he can understand what he reads. To translate such qualities from the realm of his private experience to the conventional forms of poetry is the problem of the poet; and the problem of the reader, likewise, is to come well equipped with the talent and the taste for discerning the meaning of those conventions as they particularly occur. Neither the poet’s casual language nor the reader’s casual interlocution is likely to be much help. There must be a ground common but exterior to each: that is the poem. The best poems take the best but not always the hardest reading; and no doubt it is so with the writing. Certainly, in neither case are dreams or simple reveries enough. Dreams are natural and are minatory or portentous; but except when by accident they fall into forms that fit the intelligence, they never negotiate the miracle of meaning between the poet and the poem, the poem and the reader. Most poetry fails of this negotiation, and it is sometimes assumed that the negotiation was never meant, by the poet, to be made. For the poet, private expression is said to be enough; for the reader, the agitation of the senses, the perception of verbal beauty, the mere sense of stirring life in the words, are supposed sufficient. If this defence had a true premise—if the poet did express himself to his private satisfaction—it would be unanswerable; and to many it is so. But I think the case is different, and this is the real charge against Mr. Cummings, the poet does not ever express himself privately. The mind cannot understand, cannot properly know its own musings until those musings take some sort of conventional form. Properly speaking a poet, or any man, cannot be adequate to himself in terms of himself. True consciousness and true expression of consciousness must be external to the blind seat of consciousness—man as a sensorium. Even a simple image must be fitted among other images, and conned with them, before it is understood. That is, it must take a form in language which is highly traditional and conventional. The genius of the poet is to make the convention apparently disappear into the use to which he puts it. Mr. Cummings and the group with which he is here roughly associated, the anti-culture or

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anti-intelligence group, persists to the contrary. Because experience is fragmentary as it strikes the consciousness it is thought to be essentially discontinuous and therefore essentially unintelligible except in the fragmentary form in which it occurred. They credit the words they use with immaculate conception and there hold them unquestionable. A poem, because it happens, must mean something and mean it without relation to anything but the private experience which inspired it. Certainly it means something, but not a poem; it means that something exciting happened to the writer and that a mystery is happening to the reader. The fallacy is double: they believe in the inexorable significance of the unique experience; and they have discarded the only method of making the unique experience into a poem—the conventions of the intelligence. As a matter of fact they do not write without conventions, but being ignorant of what they use, they resort most commonly to their own inefficient or superficial conventions—such as Mr. Cummings’ flower and doll. The effect is convention without substance; the unique experience becomes a rhetorical assurance . . . . Source: R. P. Blackmur, ‘‘Notes on E. E. Cummings’ Language,’’ in Hound & Horn, Vol. 4, No. 2, January– March 1931, pp. 163–92.

SOURCES Arthos, John, ‘‘The Poetry of E. E. Cummings,’’ in American Literature, Vol. 14, No. 4, 1943, pp. 372–90. Collins, Billy, ‘‘Is That a Poem? The Case for E. E. Cummings,’’ in Slate, April 20, 2005, http://www.slate.com/ id/2117098 (accessed July 30, 2008). cummings, e. e., ‘‘anyone lived in a pretty how town,’’ in The Columbia Anthology of American Poetry, edited by Jay Parini, Columbia University Press, 1995, pp. 437–38. Docherty, Brian, ‘‘e. e. cummings,’’ in American Poetry: The Modernist Ideal, edited by Clive Bloom and Brian Docherty, Macmillan, 1995, pp. 120–30. Hunt, B. J., ‘‘Cummings’s ‘anyone lived in a pretty how town,’’’ in the Explicator, Vol. 64, No. 4, Summer 2006, p. 226. Kidder, Rushworth M., E. E. Cummings: An Introduction to the Poetry, Columbia University Press, 1979. Kronzek, Elizabeth, ‘‘Transcendentalism (1815–1850),’’ in American Eras, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and Richard Layman, Gale Research, 1997. Lander, Mark, ‘‘Multiple Family Phone Lines, a PostPostwar U.S. Trend,’’ in the New York Times, December 26, 1995.

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‘‘Modernism and Experimentation: 1914–1945,’’ in Outline of American Literature, revised edition, December 2006, http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/oal/lit6.htm (accessed July 30, 2008). Penberthy, Jenny, ‘‘E. E. Cummings,’’ in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 48, American Poets, 1880–1945, Second Series, edited by Peter Quartermain, Gale Research, 1986, pp. 117–37. Reef, Catherine, E. E. Cummings: A Poet’s Life, Clarion, 2006.

FURTHER READING Cowley, Malcolm, Exile’s Return, introduction and notes by Donald W. Faulkner, Penguin, 1994. This volume on the writers of the lost generation, as well as the development of their ideas and the historical context that framed them, was first written in 1934. This edition, with an

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extensive introduction and notes by Donald W. Faulkner, is an invaluable scholarly work. cummings, e. e., The Enormous Room, Hard Press, 2006. Cummings’s first book, originally published in 1922, is a fictional version of his imprisonment and other experiences during World War I. It is considered a masterpiece of war literature. Eliot, T. S., Collected Poems, 1909-1962, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991. T. S. Eliot is another prominent contemporary of Cummings’s who is arguably the definitive writer of the modernist movement. Unlike Cummings, Eliot’s work is valued today for both its content and its style. Gay, Peter, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, W. W. Norton, 2007. Gay, a scholar of modernism and a Yale professor, presents a comprehensive overview of the modernist movement. The volume discusses the literary, artistic, and political developments that defined modernism, as well as the ideas (and ideals) that shaped it.

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The Centaur MAY SWENSON 1956

‘‘The Centaur’’ is a widely anthologized poem by May Swenson that draws on her childhood experiences in Utah and explores the power of the imagination. First published in the Western Review in 1956, it was reprinted the following year in the collection New Poems by American Poets 2 and then appeared in Swenson’s second book of poetry, A Cage of Spines, in 1958. It subsequently appeared in several other collections of Swenson’s poetry, including the posthumously published Nature: Poems Old and New in 1994. In 2007, it was published separately as an illustrated children’s book. On the surface, the poem is a simple narrative account of how Swenson’s speaker (really Swenson herself, according to an interview she once gave) spent the summer when she was ten. It describes a child’s fantasy of riding a horse that is really just a willow branch and pretending to be the horse herself. The poem has been widely praised for its depiction of mixed identities (child and horse, boy and girl), its exploration of gender roles, and its evocation of childhood’s imaginative play. Swenson is generally seen as a poet interested in nature and in the mysteries of the universe. She is also known as the creator of riddle poems illustrative of her interest in looking at things from new perspectives, making the familiar strange, and taking note of the wonder of the world. Though not technically one of her riddle

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When she was nine, Swenson’s family moved to a new house in Logan, near the area that is said to be the setting of ‘‘The Centaur.’’ According to R. R. Knudson, in her biography The Wonderful Pen of May Swenson, Swenson’s first language was Swedish and she did not learn English until she began school. But she did well in school and began writing at an early age. In high school she won a prize for a short story, and at Utah State University, where she obtained a bachelor’s degree in English and art, she wrote poetry for the college literary magazine, The Scribble, and also wrote a column for the student newspaper. After graduation, Swenson worked as a reporter in Logan, then moved to Salt Lake City, where she did clerical work. When she later moved to New York City she also worked as a clerk. In the 1930s and through most of the 1940s she could not get her poems published, but she did get work as an interviewer for the Federal Writers’ Project from 1938 to 1939. Her breakthrough came in 1949, when the Saturday Review of Literature published her poem ‘‘Haymaking.’’ Four years later the New Yorker published one of her riddle poems, ‘‘By Morning,’’ but gave away the answer to the riddle by changing the title to ‘‘Snow by Morning.’’

May Swenson (Oscar White / Corbis)

poems, ‘‘The Centaur’’ raises various questions about identity and creativity in a way characteristic of the poet, and its focus on a horse, albeit an imaginary horse, is consistent with her interest in animals.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Anna Thilda May Swenson was the oldest of ten children of Margaret and Dan Swenson, Swedish Lutherans who converted to Mormonism and emigrated from Sweden to Logan, Utah, where May Swenson was born on May 28, 1913. Swenson drifted away from her parents’ Mormon beliefs (poetry became her religion, according to Gudrun Grabher, writing in Body My House: May Swenson’s Work and Life), but she maintained a strong attachment to Utah, which she visited often even after moving to New York City in 1936. When she died, she was buried in Logan, at her request, on the grounds of her alma mater, Utah State Agricultural College (now Utah State University).

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Swenson’s first book of poetry, Another Animal, appeared in 1954, the same year she began working on ‘‘The Centaur.’’ After its publication in Western Review magazine in 1956 and in the anthology New Poems by American Poets 2 in 1957, ‘‘The Centaur’’ appeared in Swenson’s second book of poetry, A Cage of Spines, in 1958. Also in 1958, Swenson won the William Rose Benet Prize of the Poetry Society of America. She later won a Guggenheim grant, an Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship, and several other awards, including an honorary doctorate from her alma mater. In 1980, she became chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, a post she held until her death nine years later. She was also a writer-inresidence for a year at Purdue University and taught poetry at other universities as well as working as an editor for a New York publisher, New Directions Press. Altogether Swenson published nine books of poetry during her lifetime, including the book of ‘‘shaped’’ poems called Iconographs, which won much attention when it appeared in 1970. She also published two books of riddle poems: Poems to Solve in 1966 and More Poems to Solve in 1971. Four posthumous collections were published in

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the decade after her death, along with Made with Words, a book of interviews, letters, essays, fiction, and a play script. In 2004, a three-day symposium on Swenson was held at Utah State University and led to the publication of a collection of essays on her life and work, Body My House, in 2006. After two previous long-term relationships, the first with the Czechoslovak poet Anca Vrbovska and the second with the writer Pearl Schwartz, Swenson spent the last twenty-three years of her life with R. R. Knudson in Sea Cliff, New York. She died on December 4, 1989, in Ocean View, Delaware.

and swished through the dust again. I was the horse and the rider, and the leather I slapped to his rump spanked my own behind. Doubled, my two hoofs beat a gallop along the bank,

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the wind twanged in my mane, my mouth squared to the bit. And yet I sat on my steed

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quiet, negligent riding, my toes standing the stirrups, my thighs hugging his ribs. At a walk we drew up to the porch. I tethered him to a paling. Dismounting, I smoothed my skirt

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and entered the dusky hall. My feet on the clean linoleum left ghostly toes in the hall.

POEM TEXT

Where have you been? said my mother. Been riding, I said from the sink, and filled me a glass of water.

The summer that I was ten— Can it be there was only one summer that I was ten? It must have been a long one then— each day I’d go out to choose a fresh horse from my stable

What’s that in your pocket? she said. Just my knife. It weighted my pocket and stretched my dress awry. 5

which was a willow grove down by the old canal. I’d go on my two bare feet. But when, with my brother’s jack-knife, I had cut me a long limber horse with a good thick knob for a head, and peeled him slick and clean except a few leaves for the tail, and cinched my brother’s belt

yet they were shaped like a horse. My hair flopped to the side like the mane of a horse in the wind.

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Title The title ‘‘The Centaur’’ refers to a creature from Greek mythology that was half human and half horse. Interestingly, other than in the title, the term is not used anywhere in the poem. Rather than write about centaurs, Swenson’s aim is to depict a metaphorical centaur, a girl who thinks she is part horse.

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My forelock swung in my eyes, my neck arched and I snorted. I shied and skittered and reared, stopped and raised my knees, pawed at the ground and quivered. My teeth bared as we wheeled

Go tie back your hair, said my mother, and Why is your mouth all green? Rob Roy, he pulled some clover as we crossed the field, I told her.

POEM SUMMARY

his feet to swift half-moons. The willow knob with the strap jouncing between my thighs was the pommel and yet the poll of my nickering pony’s head. My head and my neck were mine,

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around his head for a rein, I’d straddle and canter him fast up the grass bank to the path, trot along in the lovely dust that talcumed over his hoofs, hiding my toes, and turning

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The poem begins with an adult speaker reminiscing about her childhood, about the summer when she was ten. Right away there is wonder in her voice because she can hardly believe there was only one such summer. This attitude of wonder is typical of Swenson’s poetry; so is her questioning, inquiring approach to life, indicated grammatically by casting the main part of the first stanza as a question. Another grammatical feature of the opening stanza is that it is largely a parenthetical aside; it is as if the speaker, or the poet, is so full of information and so alive to connections

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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS 

‘‘The Centaur,’’ recorded on the long-playing vinyl record Some Haystacks Don’t Even Have Any Needle and read by Anne Anglin, was released by Scott Foresman (1970).

that she can hardly start in one direction without wanting to go in another, perhaps a bit like a wayward horse.

Stanza 2 Stanza 2 completes the parenthetical aside about there being only one summer when the speaker was ten. Of course, a literal-minded person would say, how could there be more than one summer for any year? However, Swenson and her speaker are poets; they say apparently impossible things to get at deeper truths, in this case the fact that the summer in question seemed very long. It must have been a long one, she says, which again literally makes no sense; summers are always the same length. This is a poem about feelings, though, and that summer felt long to the speaker, or perhaps she means that there were more summers like it. What should be noted is that the tone is not grumbling; this is not a complaint that the summer dragged on and on; it is a memory of a delightful time. There is an aspect of pastoral idyll here—a depiction of a simpler, ideal time. The tone of the opening establishes a positive attitude towards the events of that summer before the speaker even says what they were. The second and third lines of the second stanza begin to recount what happened the summer the speaker was ten. She says that she would go each day to choose a different horse from her stable. A reader who stopped at the end of this stanza—and the stanza break does encourage such a stop—might think the speaker was wealthy, with a stable full of real horses to choose from. However, the lack of punctuation at the end of the stanza, the running on of the sentence from this stanza to the next, means that the reader will no doubt carry on without stopping.

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In stanza 3, the speaker reveals that there were no real horses; she was not the child of wealthy horse owners; her stable was actually a grove of willow trees down near an old canal. Paul Crumbley, writing in Body My House, notes that this was the actual canal near where Swenson lived as a child. This brings out the autobiographical aspect of the poem, but in the poem, the oldness of the canal coupled with the fact that the young girl had to go out to it suggests a movement away from the everyday to someplace that may turn out to be magical in some way. The stanza ends with the speaker saying she would go barefoot to the grove. The fact that she was going barefoot suggests a movement, in this case away from society with its clothes and shoes and into nature with its lack of artificial coverings. That is probably the main sense that this sentence conveys on first reading, but in retrospect the reader might note that the speaker emphasizes that she walked on her own two feet; the statement is somewhat odd, for who else’s feet might the girl have gone on? The reader soon learns who else’s feet might have been involved.

Stanza 4 The first word in stanza 4 indicates some contrast with the immediately preceding statement that the girl went down to the canal on her own feet. However, it will be a few more stanzas before the point of the contrast is made clear; in the meantime the reader is left wondering why a contrast has been set up while the speaker plunges into a parenthetic clause about using her brother’s knife to cut herself a horse. Here the reader learns, if it was not already clear, that the horses are just branches from the willow trees. At least, that is the reader’s natural assumption, though the speaker does not actually say they are branches; she simply says that she cut herself a horse, making a sort of metaphor, except that this is less a metaphorical way of describing a branch as a horse than an account of a little girl who thought, or pretended to think, that her branch was a horse.

Stanza 5 Stanza 5 goes into more detail about how the girl would transform her willow branch into a horse. Swenson was often praised for her attention to detail, and here she describes the peeling of the branch and the leaves arranged for a tail. The speaker also notes that she used her brother’s

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belt (again something of her brother’s) to gird around the branch, tightening, maintaining control. There are elements of both wildness and control. Traditionally, reason and the passions have been depicted metaphorically as a rider and his horse, with the rider needing to keep his horse under control, just as reason in a human being was expected to keep the passions under control.

own, now she says that at the same time they were like a horse, and her hair was like a horse’s mane, blowing in the wind. This could be considered a simile, but it is more a statement of transformation. The speaker remembers that as a girl when she went out on her willow branch she began to feel like a horse.

Stanza 11 Stanza 6 Stanza 6 continues the notion of control by explaining that the belt, when tightened around the branch, was meant to function as a rein, but the speaker no sooner finishes saying that than she talks of making her horse take up a moderate gallop, as if control had been forgotten and the main point is to give in to adventure.

Stanza 7 In this stanza the speaker says she would trot in the dust, which she describes by use of the word lovely. Why dust should be lovely is not clear, but perhaps it is because it is part of nature, and the idea here is to escape into nature. In this stanza the reader also begins to understand why the sentence that began in stanza 4, and which is still going on, emphasizes the feet of the speaker. In this stanza the speaker describes how the dust hid her toes and covered her horse’s hoofs. Though she arrived on two feet, she is now riding on four hoofs; a transformation is underway.

Stanza 8 Stanza 8 finishes the thought about the horse’s hoofs, which are referred to as feet here. Perhaps this indicates that the transformation from human to horse is not complete. There is also another possibility. Swenson is often seen as a poet who describes blending, and the poem seems to display some blending between human and animal.

Stanza 9 In this stanza, the transformation from human to horse, or the blending of human and horse, continues. The willow knob, the speaker says, was part of the saddle and part of the horse’s head. At the same time, she says her head and her neck were her own, and there the stanza ends; like most of the stanzas it ends in mid-sentence.

Horse imagery continues in this stanza, with the speaker using the word forelock, a term for hair usually used only in connection with horses. Also, she describes herself as snorting and performing other actions that a horse might do.

Stanza 12 Stanza 12 continues the detailed description of the girl as a horse, but then there is a pronoun shift. She suddenly switches to the first-person plural we. It appears that now she is both girl and horse, understood as two separate identities that are nonetheless one.

Stanza 13 Here the speaker explicitly declares the merging of identities between horse and rider that was implied in the previous stanza. It is less that she becomes transformed from human to horse than that she conjures up an imaginary horse and partly becomes him while yet remaining herself. She is both the magical imaginary creature and the ordinary person riding the creature, so when she smacks his rear, she is also hitting her own behind, as she says at the start of the next stanza.

Stanza 14 The speaker finishes the thought about how slapping the horse’s rear means hitting herself and begins the next sentence with a word that is a highly appropriate term to describe what is happening; she has become double—she is both herself and another.

Stanza 15 Stanza 15 explores the doubleness of the situation. The speaker says that she was both the one with the bit in her mouth, in other words, the horse being controlled by a rider, and yet at the same time the rider herself, sitting on her steed.

Stanza 10

Stanza 16

In stanza 10, the sentence continues with another contrast. Although the speaker said in the previous stanza that her head and neck were her

Stanza 16 provides more detail about how she was the rider, pressing her legs around the horse’s ribs, standing in the stirrups. The end of the

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sentence marks the end of the stanza. Instead of ending the stanza in mid-sentence and so carrying the reader on to the next stanza, as she has done in most of the previous stanzas, Swenson here orders a stop, marking the end of a section of the poem.

Stanza 17 Stanza 17 marks a change in tone. A calmness descends after the wild galloping, the snorting, the riding in the wind. Now the pace slows, literally, to a walk, as the speaker describes how she would return to her house, riding slowly up to the porch and tying her horse to the fence: an odd image, because she would have been tying one piece of wood to another. The wild ride is over; in a way, the reader only realizes its wildness retrospectively because of the contrasting calm introduced by this stanza. Now it is time to go back inside. The speaker describes how she would dismount, rearranging her skirt, a symbolic way of saying she was adjusting herself for domestic life again, if the skirt is interpreted to stand for all of domestic life.

Stanza 18 In this stanza the speaker describes how she would go inside, into a gloomy, dark hall, implying a contrast with the way things were outside in what presumably was bright sunshine, though she never mentioned that. It is an implied retrospective description through contrast. The contrast continues in the last two lines of the stanza; she would walk on clean linoleum, leaving footprints, suggesting that indoors it is not only gloomy but sterile, as if the outdoors was much more alive. The ghostliness of her footprints seems to suggest a fading away, into a ghost, of her barefoot adventuring self, now to be replaced by a more conventional indoor self. Using the word ghostly to describe the footprints also suggests that her barefoot self had some magical or supernatural aspects.

Stanza 19 Stanza 18 having ended with a period, marking another break, stanza 19 introduces a new character, the speaker’s mother, who promptly asks the girl where she has been, a typical maternal question. This is not like the musing, wondering question of the opening stanza, posed by the nostalgic speaker remembering a magical time

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with fondness. This is the voice of authority, of the established order, trying to bring a wayward child back into line. The child answers with what might be considered the truth, saying she was riding, though of course it was just a fantasy ride. That the ride and the fantasy are over, and that life must now return to normality, is indicated by her getting a glass of water from the sink (not the place a horse would go for water).

Stanza 20 In stanza 20 the mother asks the second of three questions she will put to her daughter, asking what the girl has in her pocket. Again, this sounds like the voice of authority noting something wrong, posing a question that is full of interrogation rather than wonder. Interestingly, the girl answers that it is her knife, not her brother’s knife, which it actually is. It is as if she has appropriated something, as if perhaps she has not completely returned to the normality of her role as a proper little girl. As if to reinforce this point, she says that the weight of the knife in her pocket has stretched her dress; here again a piece of clothing is used symbolically. By using her brother’s knife and going out on a wild ride the girl has become something other than a normal little girl.

Stanza 21 The final stanza begins with the mother giving an order to the girl to tie her hair back. The reader may remember that the girl’s hair has been flying in the wind like a horse’s mane at the climax of her ride; now she is to tie it down, restore order, come back home. Then in one of the oddest moments in the poem, the mother asks her final question, wanting to know why the girl’s mouth is green. The girl’s answer is that Rob Roy, presumably the name she has given to her imaginary horse, has been eating clover in the field. This would mean that since she was the horse and since her mouth is green now, she was chewing on the grass herself. It is a final statement of how she blended with her imaginary horse, becoming a horse briefly, even bringing home the evidence. Jean Gould, writing in Modern American Women Poets, notes that the final stanza is the only four-line stanza in the whole poem. Paul Crumbley, in Body My House, sees a rhyming couplet at the end, which emphasizes the last point of the poem, when the girl tells her mother

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this strange story about Rob Roy eating clover and thus causing her own mouth to turn green. Crumbley argues that this indicates acceptance by the mother, and perhaps it does, though her reply is not given and Swenson herself, discussing this poem in an interview reprinted in Made with Words, says that in the closing stanzas the mother is scolding the girl. However, the exchange does perhaps indicate that the girl felt confident enough to tell her fantasy, as if trying to bring the magic home and communicate what she had been able to imagine. Finally, it is worth noting that the name the girl gives to the horse is Rob Roy, a common name for a horse, but also the name of an eighteenthcentury Scottish hero and outlaw. This suggests that her adventure was of the outlaw kind, or at least one that pushed the limits of propriety.

THEMES Nostalgia The poem is in part a nostalgic evocation of childhood and the sort of thing a child might get up to. This at least is how the poem opens, with the adult speaker remembering the summer when she was ten, but though the poem develops several contrasts, this contrast between present and past fades away, and at the end there is no return to the adult’s world and little sense of the adult looking back. In the opening stanzas the very tenses the speaker uses emphasize that she is looking back; she talks of what she would do each day in that distant summer: she would go down to the willow grove, she would ride her horse, and so on. But by the middle of the poem the speaker shifts to the simple past; her hair blew around like a mane; she shied and skittered, reared and galloped; and then she slowed to a walk and entered her house, at which point the conversation with her mother that ends the poem is presented as a specific scene that happened and then ended. There is no closing reminiscence, seeking to bring out a contrast between the adult of today and the child of the past; the nostalgia theme simply disappears.

Gender Roles A persistent theme in the poem is the exploration of gender roles. The girl takes up her brother’s

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knife to do what might conventionally be seen as a boy’s task: cutting a branch from a tree to serve as her horse. She also takes her brother’s belt to use as the reins on her ‘‘horse.’’ Moreover, in the 1950s, some might have seen the riding adventure as too wild for a girl, bringing out her tomboyish side. At the end the girl calls the knife her own, as if she has appropriated this symbol of boyhood, which has stretched her dress, disordering the symbol of girlhood. The end of the poem brings out some antagonism between the girl and her mother, with the mother intent on making sure her daughter is ladylike while the daughter wants to talk about her fantasy adventure. In a way, it is a depiction of childhood rebellion against parental authority, or perhaps more an attempt by parental authority to rein in an overly exuberant child who is impatient with conventional rules and roles.

Imagination The poem is a celebration of the imagination, of the girl’s ability to conjure up a fantasy about riding a horse that engulfs her so much that she becomes the horse while at the same time remaining the rider. There are moments when she seems all horse, as when she says that she snorted and pawed at the ground, but at other times there is a doubled consciousness, with the girl being both the horse with the bit in her mouth and the rider on top of the horse. This double existence is eerily magical. It seems in some ways a metaphor for the act of poetic creation. Swenson herself made the comparison when talking of this poem in the interview reprinted in Made with Words, saying what the girl does in the poem is what an artist does in her art, becoming what she creates. The theme is thus the power of the imagination and the mystical nature of creation, in which a girl can half become the horse she creates just as a poet can half become her own poem. It seems in a way an illustration of the famous line from the poem ‘‘Among School Children’’ by W. B. Yeats, in which he asks how one can differentiate between the dancer and the dance that he or she dances. This doubleness or uncertainty seems central to Swenson’s poem, illustrating the process by which one enters almost completely into one’s creation and yet remains still apart, a conscious mind guiding the unconscious spirit.

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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY 

Research the history and beliefs of Mormonism. How did the Mormons come to be in Utah? How are Mormon beliefs different from and similar to the beliefs of various Christian denominations? Write a report detailing your findings, including the role of Mormonism today.



Explore the writings of Emily Dickinson and compare them to those of May Swenson. What topics did they have in common? How were their techniques and form similar or different? Write an essay outlining their similarities and differences.



Think of a time in your life when you enjoyed playing games based on fantasies of being something or someone else. Write a short account (a story or poem) about what that was like.



Look at the new children’s picture book version of ‘‘The Centaur,’’ illustrated by Sherry Meidell. Are the illustrations what you would have expected? Also, do you think this poem

STYLE Line Endings The poem is written in free verse (a form of poetry in which no formal meter is used) without any rhyme scheme, though perhaps with a rhymed couplet at the end and some internal rhyme at the beginning, but it is not as free as in some of Swenson’s other poems. There is enjambment, meaning that sentences carry over from one stanza to another, creating a feeling of movement in the poem, but most lines end with the end of syntactic units; phrases generally are not broken over two lines, but come to an end when the lines end, so there is regularity as well as movement, order as well as wildness, reflecting the content of the poem.

is too difficult and complex for young children? Can young children enjoy the poem on one level while teenagers and adults enjoy it on another, in the same way that both children and adults can understand and enjoy books like Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels? Create a poster showing images of the centaur from children’s books, Greek mythology, and art. Give a presentation to the class about the various representations of the mythical figure, and lead a discussion about whether or not the poem is appropriate for young children. 

Organize a debate in your class about whether parents try to control their children too much. Should parents allow their children to spend more time on their own doing what they want, or is it better that they learn in a more formal and structured manner? Conduct some research into different theories of child rearing, then divide into debate teams and present the different arguments.

another: the willow branch is a horse; the girl’s hair is a horse’s mane; and the girl snorts and paws the ground in a horse-like manner. However, these are not true metaphors used to describe the girl or the branch but signs of a transformation going on in which the branch becomes a horse, and the girl becomes a centaur. However, the whole poem can be seen as a metaphor for poetic creation. The poem uses real objects such as the knife and the dress to symbolize larger things, in this case boyishness and girlishness. This could also be called synecdoche, in which a part of something, for instance the dress, stands for the whole of something, in this case female identity.

Metaphors, Symbolism, and Synecdoche

Pacing

‘‘The Centaur’’ might be said to contain metaphors, in which one thing is described in terms of

In the middle of the poem, Swenson carries the reader along for the ride, moving from the nearly

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A centaur (Ó Christie’s Images / SuperStock)

stationary (the girl cutting the willow branch) to the beginnings of serious motion as the horse canters and trots. Her choice of words increases the sense of acceleration as she describes the horse’s feet as swift and has the girl’s hair blow in the wind. Then the rider and horse wheel and gallop. The words create a sense of speed, which suddenly stops as the rider and horse slow to a walk. Swenson’s control of the language enables her to make the reader feel part of the ride as it begins, gathers speed, then slows.

Heroic Quest The poem might be seen as enacting the heroic quest, a story structure that is common in literature. In the poem, the hero, in this case the tenyear-old girl, leaves civilization, that is, her house, to venture into a magical realm, in this case the willow grove by the canal, where willow branches can change into horses. She takes part in a magical transformation, becoming a centaur,

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at least figuratively, getting so caught up in the fantasy that she even gets her mouth green, presumably by eating grass or at least miming the action of eating grass. Then she returns from her heroic adventure and brings news of it to the representative of everyday life, in this case her mother. It is true that she slays no dragons, since this is not a violent quest; however, it still contains elements of heroism, the courage to enter a zone of personal transformation

HISTORICAL CONTEXT The Mormons and Utah Swenson’s parents converted to Mormonism, more properly known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a religion founded by Joseph Smith in 1830 and established itself under Brigham Young in Utah later in that century. The Mormons dominated Utah in Swenson’s

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COMPARE & CONTRAST 

1920s: Children are left free to amuse themselves with games such as marbles or skipping rope, without parental supervision, during their playtime.

of the 1960s and beyond would later overturn many assumptions about women’s capabilities and break down the notions of male and female spheres.

1950s: With the appearance of books such as Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care, after World War II, parents begin to become more involved in their children’s daily activities.

Today: Because of the impact of nearly fifty years of feminist activism, women now lead countries, hold executive positions, and do many other things once seen as the province of men alone.

Today: There is increasing concern in some quarters that parents are over-managing their children, over-structuring their lives, and preparing them too early for the adult world. 

1920s: First-wave feminism, through the women’s suffrage movement, challenges the male monopoly on political power. However, it pays less attention to domestic and labor roles, and in these realms, clearly demarcated spheres for men (the workplace) and women (the home) persist. 1950s: Although the necessities of World War II sent women out of the home to do work formerly seen as male, in the 1950s, gender roles revert to the traditional division of family labor, at least in middle-class families. However, the women’s liberation movement

childhood, and the rest of her family was strongly devoted to Mormonism, but even as a child Swenson did not feel strongly connected to it. Part of what the girl in ‘‘The Centaur’’ may be escaping is Mormon rules of propriety. According to R. R. Knudson, in her biography The Wonderful Pen of May Swenson, Swenson as a child liked to play cards and later took up smoking, even though both activities were frowned on by Mormons. The Mormons also had strict notions of gender roles, again something that the girl in Swenson’s poem seems to be escaping, or subverting. It is not that Swenson, in this poem or others, attacked the Mormon religion; it is more that she simply looked elsewhere for spiritual and moral guidance.

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1920s: Children entertain themselves with simple games and toys. They often make their own toys from natural objects. Children also spend most of their recreational time outdoors unless bad weather prevents them from doing so. 1950s: With the advent of television and the appearance of more elaborate board games such as Monopoly and Clue, many children begin to spend more time indoors and less time on simpler pastimes. Today: Many children spend so much time at their computers and watching television that a national advertising campaign is launched to encourage them to spend more of their time in active, outdoor play.

Feminism The first wave of the women’s movement, bringing voting rights and other basic civil rights to women, was in full force in Swenson’s early years, and a second wave of feminism, focused on gender roles, gathered force in the 1960s, not long after Swenson wrote ‘‘The Centaur.’’ However, Swenson shied away from movements such as this; she was not one to join protests or issue polemics. What her writing does illustrate, though, is a willingness to explore topics traditionally considered masculine, for instance astronauts and the space program and technology generally. Her writings, including ‘‘The Centaur,’’ also explore gender roles. Alicia Ostriker,

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in Writing Like a Woman, states that Swenson did not write typical women’s poetry, and Swenson herself disdained labels and did not like to be considered a feminist poet or a lesbian poet. She said that good poetry could combine male and female qualities, a principle embodied by the protagonist in ‘‘The Centaur.’’

The Beat Movement Anticipating the counterculture of the 1960s, the Beat movement in poetry and other writing arose in the 1950s in opposition to the conformity and materialism of mainstream culture. Its leading members included Allen Ginsberg, best known for his poem Howl (1956), the publication of which led to an obscenity trial. Other notable Beats included Jack Kerouac, known for his novel On the Road (1957), and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a poet who founded City Lights Books in San Francisco. Swenson was aware of the Beats, but just as she would not associate herself with political movements, she kept her distance from this literary movement. According to her biographer, R. R. Knudson, in The Wonderful Pen of May Swenson, Swenson felt somewhat oldfashioned in comparison to the Beats, with their talk about nuclear war, poverty, racism, and other social issues. She did not feel she could be a protester the way they were, even though her writing tended to express the freedom from conformity that the Beats were advocating.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW When A Cage of Spines, the collection that included ‘‘The Centaur,’’ was published in 1958, it was widely praised by critics and by poets, including Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Wilbur, and Robert Lowell. The success of the book led to poetry readings, and at one of these readings, Swenson was introduced as the poet who wrote about being a horse, obviously a reference to ‘‘The Centaur.’’ The poem later became widely anthologized. In general, Swenson has been praised for her verve, her detailed observations, and her use of rhythm. Ann Stanford, in an article in Southern Review, focuses on Swenson’s powers of observation and her ability to describe the merging and transformation of objects that she sees. Stanford refers to ‘‘The Centaur’’ as an example of such merging involving a magical sleight of

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hand that allows the objects to combine and yet remain separate. Idris McElveen, writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, follows Stanford in seeing perception as central to Swenson, and like Stanford she sees merging as the key to ‘‘The Centaur,’’ in which she also detects erotic imagery. McElveen also reports that Swenson has been compared to Emily Dickinson, the revered nineteenth-century poet who is sometimes seen as standing outside the literary tradition. Swenson is nontraditional in the sense that she is highly original (as noted by Alicia Ostriker, for one, in Writing Like a Woman) and, in the view of John Hollander, writing in The Work of Poetry, hard to categorize. Hollander writes that Swenson’s poems are ‘‘systematically ad hoc,’’ adding that there is ‘‘no classifying term for [the] organizing principle’’ of her poetry; she puts her poems together, he states, according to personal principles. McElveen also compares Swenson to the English romantic poet William Blake, in the sense that both of them composed poetry that works on several levels. Blake’s ‘‘deceptively simple poems,’’ McElveen writes, resemble Swenson’s in the sense that Swenson’s poems ‘‘are easy enough for children to read and enjoy,’’ but both poets are also ‘‘often symbolic and visionary.’’ She adds that even in the simplest of Swenson’s poems ‘‘there are always many things going on, many interconnected levels and poemswithin-poems beneath simple surfaces.’’ Cynthia Hogue, writing in Body My House, praises ‘‘The Centaur’’ for its portrayal of hybrid identity. She writes that the lines about the girl using her brother’s jackknife ‘‘suggest a sly performance of the charade of masculinity,’’ adding that ‘‘the girl in Swenson’s poem crosses and confuses discrete categories of sexual identity.’’ Michael Spooner, also writing in Body My House, sees ‘‘The Centaur’’ as being in the tradition of the French eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wrote of man’s goodness when in the state of nature, before the creation of society: ‘‘One hears Rousseau . . . when she considers the green freedom of the natural world, as she does in ‘The Centaur’ and other poems.’’ In general, Swenson is seen as a poet of wonder and speculation, whose poetic explorations of the mysteries of the universe can make familiar objects unfamiliar and cause readers to think about things they have taken for granted.

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CRITICISM Sheldon Goldfarb Goldfarb is a specialist in Victorian literature who has published nonfiction books as well as a novel for young adults. In this essay, he describes May Swenson’s exploration of imagination in ‘‘The Centaur,’’ suggesting that it reflects her beliefs about poetic creativity. ‘‘The Centaur’’ begins with an air of nostalgia. An adult speaker looks back with some pleasure at her ten-year-old self and the joys of summer adventures. One might expect a sigh over remembrance of things past, but that is not the direction the poem actually takes. Instead, as the poem unfolds, the adult speaker almost disappears and is certainly not there to pine over lost pleasures. Instead, the poem focuses on a specific, though perhaps characteristic, incident that occurred when the ten-year-old girl went down to the willow grove to cut herself a ‘‘horse.’’ This is a quite magical incident that Swenson describes in characteristically full detail, making it come alive for the reader. The speaker’s younger self, the ten-year-old girl, goes down to a willow grove near an old canal, turns a stick into a horse, and then follows up that trick by turning herself into a horse, or at least partly into a horse, creating a hybrid being, part human and part horse, the centaur of the title. Instead of a sad evocation of vanished youth from the standpoint of middle age, the poem erupts into a celebration of youth that seems not to have vanished at all. The reader rides with the young girl as she canters and trots and finally gallops along the path, hair waving in the wind, arching, snorting, rearing even, and if we are to believe the poem’s ending, stopping to eat some grass. It is interesting that the reader does not get to see the ‘‘centaur’’ chomping on the grass; perhaps some things are too implausible (or magical?) to portray. In any case, the ten-year-old girl so loses herself in her fantasy that she seems a long way from the house she eventually returns to, with its linoleum and its sink, a perfectly normal house where a mother stands ready to call her daughter back from the magical land she has gone to. The poem works on several levels and makes many points, one of which is that the magical land is never very far from the normal house. It does not require any grand journey or expensive

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INSTEAD OF A SAD EVOCATION OF VANISHED YOUTH FROM THE STANDPOINT OF MIDDLE AGE, THE POEM ERUPTS INTO A CELEBRATION OF YOUTH THAT SEEMS NOT TO HAVE VANISHED AT ALL.’’

apparatus to get there; all that is needed is a brother’s knife and belt and a short trip to the willow grove. In this magical land girls can act like boys, or like horses, or like a combination of a child and a horse. The poem on one level is an exploration of doubleness, of doubled identity, or interaction with another, with the ‘‘other.’’ There is much play with rein and bit here; it is not all wildness and exuberance; there is an attempt at order and control, reflected in the relatively controlled nature of the verse form, with very little enjambment for a free verse poem. Still, there is that wild riding, the bared teeth, the swiftly traveling hoofs traversing the dust. There is control and wildness, a delicate balance of what could metaphorically be the traditional pairing of reason and passion, reason being the rider and passion being the horse. As critics have noted, however, it is misleading to speak of rider and horse in this poem as two separate entities; they are blended into one. There really is only one being here, a ten-yearold girl with her willow branch, and yet they are two as well; Swenson here is exploring the nature of unity and duality. To do so she has transported her heroine, and her reader, to a magical land where human beings can merge with animals, where wild animal natures can emerge and yet be controlled by human reason. What this may represent metaphorically is the act of artistic creation. Here is a ten-year-old girl letting her imagination run free and conjuring up a centaur, an animal-human merger that she can even report to her mother, just as a poet can go into a trancelike state, call up a metaphorical canal in a metaphorical willow grove, and create a set of verses. A successful set of verses will plumb emotional depths and conjure up something out of the deepest wildness while

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WHAT DO I READ NEXT? 

Poems to Solve, published in 1966, was Swenson’s first collection of riddle poems. She included ‘‘The Centaur’’ in it, presumably because she considered it a sort of riddle poem.

Iconographs, published in 1970, is a collection of Swenson’s noted shaped poems, in which the way the words of each poem are arranged on the page is part of the effect.  For a novel about an adventurous child, readers might enjoy The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, published in 1876. In this novel, Twain portrays a clever child who delights in being outdoors, but unlike the girl in Swenson’s poem, Tom interacts with other children, often in a mischievous way. 

For another poem about creativity and duality, see ‘‘Among School Children’’ by W. B. Yeats, first published in 1928. It is available in any collection of Yeats’s works.  For another account written in the 1950s about growing up in the 1920s, see Where Did You Go? Out. What Did You Do? Nothing by Robert Paul Smith, published in 1957. In this book Smith warns against over-managing children and advocates letting them be free to do more of what they want. 

being shaped, controlled, and structured by the poet’s rational consciousness. Swenson herself saw poetic creation this way and compared the act of imagination in her poem to the act of imagination that creates such poems. In an interview in 1977, reprinted in Made with Words, she talked about ‘‘The Centaur,’’ first explaining its autobiographical roots. She herself was the ten-year-old in the poem; she would go down to an actual willow grove and cut a switch that became a hobby horse; and when she rode the hobby horse she felt she was riding a real horse and then felt herself to be the horse itself.

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This is the act of imagination that she describes in the poem, and as she says, this act of imagination, this ability to become something else, an animal, a horse, or whatever, is the same sort of activity that a poet carries out in imagining a poem. The artist, according to Swenson, becomes her artistic creation; to write a poem you become the poem, trancelike transported to another world, just as the ten-year-old girl is transported into a world where she can become part of a horse. What of the disappearing adult speaker in all this? Perhaps the reason this is not a poem about a sad middle-aged adult whose magic has disappeared is that, once she begins to describe the magic, it comes back to her. She has not lost it at all. Probably neither the adult speaker in the poem nor the middle-aged Swenson would go to a willow grove to create horses, but they may still conjure up magic. Swenson could still write poems. ‘‘The Centaur’’ is therefore not an elegy mourning the loss of magic, but a celebration of magic that still exists. In a century full of gloomy modernism and gloomy, linoleum-covered hallways, Swenson could still create a joyful poem celebrating the power of the imagination, a power this poem suggests need not fade with age. This is why the summer at the beginning of the poem seems so long: for Swenson and her speaker that summer of imagination never really ended. When the Beat poet movement began in the 1950’s, Swenson felt a bit old-fashioned, thinking at first she should be more like the poets in this new angry movement. But she found that she could not. She was not an angry protester; she was rather a celebrant of life’s mysteries, exploring and stimulating. Of course, she wrote some sad poems too, exploring the anguish of life, but in ‘‘The Centaur’’ she tapped into the exuberant power that animated her own imagination and presented an explanation of the poetic process itself, with the poem being its own illustration. Here in this poem is the poet plunging into the magical realm where poems are made, showing the reader how it is done. Just as the girl in the poem comes back home from her adventure with a tale to tell, so does the poet come forward with her poem, shaped from the magical materials she collected while giving full rein to her imagination. Thus ‘‘The Centaur,’’ while being a poem about gender roles and hybrid identities, nature and the

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MAY SWENSON WAS A VISIONARY POET, A PRODIGIOUS OBSERVER OF THE FRAGILE AND MIRACULOUS NATURAL WORLD, A POET WHO BROUGHT OUR DEEPEST QUESTIONS TO THE CENTER OF HER WORK.’’

outdoors, and the relationship between mothers and daughters, is above all a poem about the power of imagination and the ways of poetic creation. Source: Sheldon Goldfarb, Critical Essay on ‘‘The Centaur,’’ in Poetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2009.

Priscilla Long In the following excerpt, Long praises the poems of Nature: Poems Old and New, including ‘‘The Centaur,’’ for their musicality and insight. May Swenson was a visionary poet, a prodigious observer of the fragile and miraculous natural world, a poet who brought our deepest questions to the center of her work. By the time she died in 1989 at 76 she had published some 450 poems in ten books, including a few poems that rank among the finest composed in the late twentieth century. Nature: Poems Old and New contains 183 poems selected and ordered to emphasize her affinity with the out-of-doors. The poems are lush, delicious, witty, luminous and at times deeply philosophical. Swenson was an unrelentingly lyrical poet, a master of the poetic line in which similar sounds accumulate and resonate so that the poem exists, beyond its meanings, as a rattle or a music box or, in moments of greatness, a symphony. Consider ‘‘The Beauty of the Head,’’ a poem on the under-explored subject of defecation: . . . . Lake is our bathtub, dish-sink, drinking jug, and (since the boat’s head doesn’t work, —the ice box, either—the bilge pump barely) lake is water closet, too. Little I knew a gale this night would wash, and then wind-wipe my rump hung over the rail.

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Listen to the jingle of short ‘‘i’s’’ in dish-sink and drinking. Note the chugging of short ‘‘u’s’’ in tub, jug, pump, rump, hung. Mind the alliterative whooshing of water, wash and wind-wipe. Musicality informs nearly every line of every poem. It is grounded in Swenson’s formidable powers of observation that in certain poems reach breathtaking virtuosity. In ‘‘Look Closer’’ description mounts to revelation as the chant ‘‘look closer’’ prompts another look at one particular plant. . . . I once heard a very good poet remark that a poet’s strongest attribute may also be her weakest. Swenson’s musicality and her observational genius give us her slight poems as well as her great ones. The least memorable are skillfully designed trinkets that don’t reach beyond the observed to attain the metaphorical transformations of her greatest work. The literal, surface level of meaning is the only one. ‘‘October Textures’’ are October textures and nothing more: ‘‘The brushy and hairy, / tassely and slippery. . . . ’’ I did not want ‘‘I want the fluffy stuff to keep coming down’’ (‘‘The Fluffy Stuff’’). Perhaps a great poem requires a great subject, a quintessential conflict. ‘‘The Snowy’’ addresses an owl in a zoo hunched on its ‘‘cement crag, black talons just showing. . . . ’’ Building on the longer, more expansive line of Swenson’s most metaphorically resonant work, the poem gains in descriptive power until the owl seems to represent wild nature itself, enraged, trapped in the small cement cell humankind has designed for it: . . . . Elemental form simplified as an egg, you held perfectly still on your artificial perch. You, too, might be a crafty fake, stuffed or carved. Except your eyes. Alive, enormous, yellow circles containing black circles, clear, slick, heartstopping double barrels of concentrated rage pointed at me. Perhaps a fourth of Swenson’s published poems contain imagery unrelated to the natural world and, happily, her compilers have included a few here. ‘‘Feel Me,’’ perhaps her greatest poem, certainly one of our greatest poems, explores a father’s enigmatic dying words, ‘‘Feel me to do right.’’ The poem simultaneously sinks and expands through layers of possible meanings. . . . . Did it mean that, though he died, he would be felt

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through some aperture . . . . Or was it merely his apology for dying? ‘‘Feel that I do right in not trying, as you insist, to stay on your side. There is the wide gateway and the splendid tower, and you implore me to wait here, with the worms!’’ The speculations on ‘‘our dad’s’’ last loaded words continue until we arrive at the spectacular epiphany. In the process of shaping a book, poets typically order and reorder their poems until the book becomes a macro-artform as the poems elaborate, contradict and mirror one another much as stanzas interact in a single poem. I would have appreciated some insight into the procedures and problems of doing this in the absence of the poet, and I also felt the need of a critical overview of Swenson’s career. In the midst of writing this review I learned from another source that Swenson had composed some nine hundred poems but that despite her many honors, only something like half her work has so far been published. As Houghton Mifflin continues the vital mission of keeping Swenson in print, I hope the editors will consider sharing important information like this with her readers. R. R. Knudson and Peter Davison (who are not identified) selected and ordered the poems topically in sections titled ‘‘Frontispieces,’’ ‘‘Selves,’’ ‘‘Days’’ and so on. I found some of their choices pedestrian. Should a poet’s twenty bird poems written over a fifty-year period be gathered into a section titled ‘‘Feathers’’? Doing so forced them to surround the strong poems such as ‘‘The Snowy’’ with incidental poems that also contain bird imagery. Grouping poems by image type—comets and moons under ‘‘Heavens’’; waves and whales under ‘‘Waters’’—highlights the obvious and produces an unnecessary glut of similar images. At some point deep in these poems, the method of presentation produced an overdose of petals and clouds. More intelligently designed groupings might have focused attention on Swenson’s larger philosophical concerns—perception itself, the nature of identity, the relationship between subject and object. In fact, the compilers shaped the most numinous section, ‘‘Selves,’’ to do exactly this. The section calls attention to Swenson’s metaphorical reach by grouping diverse poems that explore

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the boundaries of identity. In ‘‘The Centaur,’’ Swenson’s famous, superb poem about girlhood, the malleable boundaries of the self allow girl and horse to fuse: ‘‘My forelock swung in my eyes, / my neck arched and I snorted.’’ Identity (gender?) is also the subject of the long and psychologically acute ‘‘Bleeding.’’ The poem portrays an interaction between a sadistic knife-type and a submissive wound-type: Stop bleeding said the knife. I would if I could said the cut. Stop bleeding you make me messy with this blood. I’m sorry said the cut. Stop or I will sink in farther said the knife. Don’t said the cut . . . . This concrete poem—the caesura in each line makes a visual image of a jagged cut—is one of several that illustrate Swenson’s lifelong interest in typographical experiments . . . . This master of observation has put observation itself under her microscope. ‘‘Sleeping Overnight on the Shore’’ explores perception and its distortions: ‘‘Intermittent moon/ that we say climbs/ or sets, circles only.’’ The poet’s eye can see from the eye of an insect—‘‘Am I sitting on your wrist, someone immense?’’ (‘‘Alternate Hosts’’)—or from the moon where ‘‘there shines earth light/ as moonlight shines upon the earth . . . ’’ (‘‘Landing on the Moon’’). As Swenson knew, we are in the process of destroying the world of plants on which we depend for food and air. The annual destruction of dozens of species amounts to a continuous, low- grade, full-scale catastrophe. In the world of Swenson’s poetry, we look at these plants, these animals, with an eye that sees them on their own terms. We see what we stand to lose from ‘‘ . . . steam shovel, bulldozer, cement mixer/ rumbl[ing] over sand . . . ’’: There’ll be a hotdog stand, flush toilets, trash— plastic and glass, greasy cartons, crushed beercans, barrels of garbage for water rats to pick through. So, goodbye, goldeneye, and grebe and scaup and loon. Goodbye, morning walks beside the tide tinkling among clean pebbles, blue mussel shells and snail

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ACTUALLY, THE POET’S PRIMARY EFFECTS ARE HER CADENCES. THE IMPACT OF HER POEMS LIES IN THEIR URGENT SPEECH AND INCANTATORY RHYTHMS, THEIR MUSIC OF CHARMS, SPELLS, CURSES, RITUAL DANCES.’’

shells that look like staring eyeballs. Goodbye, kingfisher, little green, black-crowned heron, snowy egret. And, goodbye, oh faithful pair of swans that used to glide—god and goddess shapes of purity—over the wide water. Forget my quibbles about selection and arrangement. The poems themselves are every reason to own this book, and to treasure it. Source: Priscilla Long, ‘‘Poet’s-eye View,’’ in Women’s Review of Books, Vol. 12, No. 4, January 1995, pp. 8–9.

Grace Schulman In the following excerpt, Schulman discusses the themes of life and death in Swenson’s poems, including ‘‘The Centaur.’’ The voice of May Swenson combines the directness of intimate speech and the urgency of prayer: Body my house my horse my hound what will I do when you are fallen Where will I sleep How will I ride What will I hunt Where can I go without my mount . . . The magic of that lament, ‘‘Question,’’ from Another Animal (1954), is in its contrasts: while the details are specific, the central situation is a mystery that terrifies with each new speculation. Here as elsewhere in her poems, Swenson dwells on the living body with an immediacy that heightens the dread of its loss. Other gestures that recur in Swenson’s poetry are the insistent, unanswerable questions, ‘‘what will I do.’’ ‘‘How will I ride,’’ ‘‘What will I hunt,’’ ‘‘Where can I

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go,’’ all of them precise, all ironic, because futile. Here they are enhanced by obsessive rhyme (‘‘house,’’ ‘‘horse,’’ ‘‘hound,’’ ‘‘hunt,’’ ‘‘mount’’). Their futility is emphasized by the absence of punctuation, and again by its sudden presence, in the final line. They are meditations. Admirable too, is the voice that is neither androgynous nor gendered, but one that encompasses both sexes in its fluid boundaries and essentially human dimension: ‘‘What will I hunt,’’ the male speaker’s question, modulates here, with no abrupt tonal change, to a woman’s query, ‘‘With cloud for shift / how will I hide?’’ Questions are the wellsprings of May Swenson’s art. She inquires about simple things, such as ‘‘What is the worm doing / making its hole,’’ and about principles such as ‘‘What / is it about, / the universe, / the universe about us stretching out?’’ or, considering the moon landing, ‘‘Dare we land upon a dream?’’ In her speculations and her close observations, she fulfills Marianne Moore’s formula for the working artist: ‘‘Curiosity, observation, and a great deal of joy in the thing.’’ In subject matter a poet who, like Donne, takes all of knowledge as her province, she is as comfortable with animals and flowers as she is with anti-matter, electronic sound, and DNA. Some of her chosen forms incorporate questions, such as her ballad, ‘‘The Centaur’’: ‘‘Where have you been?’’ ‘‘Been riding.’’ Another is the ancient riddle, a form that enables her to concentrate on the object without naming it. ‘‘The Surface,’’ for example, has affinities to Dickinson’s riddles, and to her wit: ‘‘First I saw the surface, / then I saw it flow, / then I saw the underneath,’’ the poet begins, and gradually unravels the answer, the image of an eye. Swenson riddles in a quest to find a higher reality obscured by conventional names, and to fathom what is deepest within the self. By rejecting ready-made definition—those designations that enlighten—Swenson sees in the dark. She derides the ordinary labeling of things with its consequent reduction of greatness: They said there was a Thing that could not Change They could not Find it so they Named it God . . . (‘‘God’’)

The poet’s unnaming allows her to rename, in an effort to see things outside the context of common parlance. Continually the search is for a deeper meaning, the essence of the thing

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observed. In ‘‘Evolution,’’ the first poem of her first book, she exclaims: beautiful each Shape to see wonderful each Thing to name here a stone there a tree here a river there a Flame . . . May Swenson was born in 1913 in Logan, Utah, of a Mormon family, and educated at Utah State University. She was a New Yorker from 1936, and lived in Sea Cliff, New York, for twenty-three years before her death in Ocean View, Delaware, in 1989. In her lifetime, she published eleven books over three decades, nine of them poetry collections, from Another Animal (1954) to In Other Words (1987). Honored as she was during her lifetime, her books included only four hundred and fifty of the nine hundred poems she composed. Since her death, as new poems and new books continue to appear, it becomes apparent not only that her output is larger than readers have supposed, but that her stature is major. Nature (1994), the newest of the posthumous books, contains some early poems, hitherto unpublished, whose dominant tone is awe: ‘‘Remain aghast at life,’’ the poet resolves in ‘‘Earth Your Dancing Place,’’ composed as early as 1936: Enter each day as upon a stage lighted and waiting for your step . . . Wonder prevails in ‘‘Manyone Flying’’ (1975), another of the poems that appear posthumously in Nature. Here, the poet, in the guise of a high flying bird, considers the divisions between the individual and humanity: Out on the edge, my maneuverings, my wings, think they are free. Flock, where do we fly? Are we Ones? Or One, only? if only One, not lonely . . . being Manyone . . . but Who are We? And Why? . . . The title of her 1967 volume, Half Sun Half Sleep, announces that division of what May Swenson once called, ‘‘the primitive bipolar suspension in which my poems often begin to form.’’

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Her theme of division is conveyed by many of her shaped poems, or those which contain visual as well as textual metaphors. Actually, the poet’s primary effects are her cadences. The impact of her poems lies in their urgent speech and incantatory rhythms, their music of charms, spells, curses, ritual dances. Never does the typography, however intricate, supersede the cadence. As in primitive poetry, word and appearance are fused for a total effect. As if to demonstrate subtly that the shaped poems have an auditory life of their own, May Swenson chose to read aloud many of her typographical poems in 1976 on a Caedmon recording, which could not, of course, exhibit the visual pattern to her listeners. One of the poems she read was ‘‘The Lightning,’’ which she referred to as a pivotal poem in Half Sun Half Sleep. Of its typographical device, the visual metaphor, she commented: ‘‘As seen on the page, there is a streak of white space that runs diagonally through the body of the poem and this even splits some of the words.’’ The poem celebrates speech, and the white streak creates meditative pauses in lines, indicating the gap between word and event, between experience and its realization in the poem: ‘‘The Lightning’’

The lightning waked me. It slid unde r my eyelid. A black book flipped ope n to an illuminated page. Then insta ntly shut. Words of destiny were being uttered in the distance. If only I could make them out! . . . Next day, as I lay in the sun, a symbol for concei ving the universe was scratched on my e yeball. But quickly its point eclipse d, and softened, in the scabbard of my brain. My cat speaks one word: Fo ur vowels and a consonant. He rece ives with the hairs of his body the wh ispers of the stars. The kinglet spe aks by flashing into view a ruby feath er on his head. He is held by a threa d to the eye of the sun and cannot fall into error. Any flower is a per fect ear, or else it is a thousand lips . . . When will I grope clear of the entr ails of intellect? Swenson spoke, too, of a poem whose title is, antithetically, ‘‘Untitled,’’ commenting on an earlier version she read on the recording. She described the visual metaphor created by the typographical appearance on the page, noting

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that ‘‘two black crooked lines pass through the text as if to x it out. The bipolar words ‘you,’ ‘me,’ are in the center as if entangled where the two black lines cross.’’ Here, the spaces are between words, and they designate a meditative, almost painful effort at speech. ‘‘I will be earth you be the flower . . . ,’’ the poem begins, and the voice rises in passionate intensity as the lovers flail, boat and sea, earth and flood, desert and salt. Utterance is the theme, too, of ‘‘Fountains of Aix,’’ a poem from the 1963 collection, To Mix With Time. In it, the word ‘‘water’’ is split fifteen times from its lines, and poured, in effect, down the side of one stanza: A goddess is driving a chariot through water. Her reins and whips are tight white water. Bronze hoofs of horses wrangle with water. The streak of space separates the fountain’s sculptures from the water spouting from their mouths. Here are dolphins and lions and bulls, and ‘‘faces with mossy lips unlocked,’’ all uttering water, ‘‘their eyes mad / or patient or blind or astonished.’’ She builds a metaphor of the fluidity of utterance, and thence of poetry. Swenson’s pauses emphasize her wonder: In ‘‘Fire Island,’’ from Iconographs (1970), the poet contemplates the miracle of beholding light and dark—milky foam, black sky—of solitude and the group— walkers on the beach and ‘‘other watchers’’— while the two ends of the narrow island are splayed out in type above and below, creating pauses between the letters of the words ‘‘Fire’’ and ‘‘sight.’’ Typographical pauses appear throughout Swenson’s writing career. Some are part of an intricate pattern, as in ‘‘The Fountains of Aix’’ and ‘‘The Lighting.’’ Many occur in poems of two columns, and of those, some are read down the page, some across the page and still others across and down. Early and late, those patterned spaces between the words indicate opposites, ironies, reversals, paradoxes, ambiguities. For example, in a poem whose title conveys a moment in time, ‘‘While Sitting in the Tuileries and Facing the Slanting Sun,’’ the poet ironically associates, and then divides by space a swaddled infant in Giotto’s fresco, ‘‘Birth of the Virgin,’’ and a mummy in the Vatican Museum . . . . In ‘‘Bleeding,’’ from Iconographs, a space through the center is a jagged, running wound, effecting caesuras of hesitation in a dialogue between the knife and the cut. The force grows

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along with the grim realization that bleeding is precisely feeling, in this devastating relationship: I feel I have to bleed to feel I think said the cut. I don’t I don’t have to feel said the knife drying now becoming shiny. Like the polarized images found throughout Swenson’s work, the contrasts created by her typographical separations have their roots in the love poems. There are the two columns of ‘‘Evolution’’ and ‘‘Facing’’ (both to be read down the page, rather than across), each indicating another animal, the lover who is an aspect of the self. Like all the love poems, these two praise opposite beings—flame and ice, sun and moon—who move forward to their destiny. The love poems, with their high energy and ‘‘desert freedom,’’ contain, as do the poems of Shakespeare and Sir Philip Sidney, the irony that vitality can emphasize its very opposite, the certainty of life’s decline. From early on, May Swenson sings of life in death’s shadow, as in ‘‘Question,’’ quoted above, and in poems that have the word ‘‘Death’’ in their titles: ‘‘Deaths,’’ ‘‘Death Invited,’’ ‘‘The Shape of Death.’’ Did Swenson suffer great personal loss? Her biographer, R.R. Knudson, writes that the death of a beloved grandfather prompted May, as a child, to question the finality of loss. Then, as a teenager, May questioned Mormonism, and, in fact, normative religions with their conventional notions of God. It seems that later she was deeply saddened by the atrocities of World War II. Young May’s lover, the Czech poet, Anca Vrboska, lost her family to the Nazi death camps. While Vrboska wrote of Auschwitz directly, Swenson internalized, objectified, searched, as always, for the essence of death: I will lie down in Autumn let birds be flying swept into a hollow by the wind I’ll wait for dying I will lie inert unseen my hair same-colored with grass and leaves . . . (‘‘I Will Lie Down’’)

Later still, in those poems whose titles say ‘‘death,’’ Swenson plays on the Elizabethan paradox that tragic implications are perceived in the midst of life’s personal, intimate experience.

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All are poems that embody contrasts, either in their divided shape on the page, or in their imagery, or both. A fascinating early example is ‘‘Death, Great Smoothener’’: Death, great smoothener, maker of order, arrester, unraveler, sifter and changer death, great hoarder; student, stranger, drifter, traveler, flyer and nester all caught at your border; death, great halter; blackener and frightener, reducer, dissolver, seizer and welder of younger with elder, waker with sleeper death, great keeper of all that must alter; death, great heightener, leaper, evolver, greater smoothener, great whitener! The poem’s sheer energy cries of life even as it speaks to death. It has the sound of a pagan incantation, with its frightening direct address presented in clusters of heavy stresses. Swenson achieves her falling rhythm here, as in ‘‘Question,’’ with reversed iambs, and depicts death in lists of epithets, enforced by rhyme: ‘‘order,’’ ‘‘hoarder,’’ ‘‘border.’’ In contrast to the chant rhythm, the typographical shape on the page is that of an ornate Christian cross. The resonant epithets echo, for me, Caedmon’s hymn, the legendary first song of our first English poet, a song of thanksgiving: Nu sculon herigean heofonrices weard metodes meahte and his modgethanc weorc wuldorodur swa he wundra gehwos now shall we praise heaven’s keeper the maker’s might and his mind thought father of the world as of all wonder . . . Poetically, their techniques are alike: to sing of God. Caedmon takes epithets for the Anglo-Saxon warlords, such as ruler and father, and qualifies them with Christian adjectives such as . . . ‘‘eternal.’’ Swenson chants death in life, and engraves a pagan rhythm in a Christian cross. The poetry of May Swenson celebrates life’s miracles even with death in view: the wonder of speech (‘‘Fountains of Aix’’); the grandeur of God.

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(‘‘God’’); the radiance of sight (‘‘Fire Island’’). In each of these three poems, typographical division— white streaks down the middle of text, make for breath-catching pauses that enhance the excited tone. The ambiguities and paradoxes of Swenson’s poetry result from basic contradiction between our illusion of permanence and an underlying certainty of fatality. This contradiction is articulated explicitly in one of the love poems, ‘‘The Shape of Death,’’ as it was printed, in Iconographs, with a white streak down the middle of the text: What does love look like? We know the shape of death. Death is a cloud, immense and awesome. At first a lid is lifted from the eye of light. There is a clap of sound. A white blossom belches from the jaw of fright. Then, in sharp contrast to those positive assertions about death, love is presented in a series of questions: ‘‘What is its / color and its alchemy?’’ ‘‘Can it be sown and harvested?’’ The resounding theme of Swenson’s poems is there, in her concluding statement. Like life, love, though fatally transient, is ‘‘not alien—it is near—our very skin, a sheath to keep us pure of fear.’’ Source: Grace Schulman, ‘‘Life’s Miracles: The Poetry of May Swenson,’’ in American Poetry Review, Vol. 23, No. 5, September–October 1994, pp. 9–13.

Sue Russell In the following excerpt, Russell identifies autobiographical elements of Swenson’s works, including ‘‘The Centaur.’’ May Swenson, who died in 1989 at the age of seventy-six, was a lover of riddles. She liked to write them as well as to solve them—the harder the better. Like the riddle poems she assembled in two books for young readers, all her poems have the capacity to tease and delight. ‘‘A poem is a thing,’’ Swenson tells us in her introduction to one of these collections, More Poems to Solve (1972). Often based on intricate mechanisms that are not easily replicated, Swenson’s poems seem more to have been constructed than composed. Excerpting them is an extreme disservice, as it limits the reader’s perspective of the overall design. The poems often take up space in every direction on the page, asserting their identity quite literally at every turn. Individual poems have the kinetic ability to spill over diagonally

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HAVING GROWN UP IN A FAMILY OF PRACTICING MORMONS, IT IS CERTAINLY NOT SURPRISING THAT SWENSON WOULD SHOW AN OVERACTIVE ATTENTION TO ‘DELICIOUS SIN.’ THE THEME OF THE RECALCITRANT CHILD IS A STRONG PRESENCE THROUGHOUT HER WORK IN POEMS LIKE ‘THE CENTAUR.’’’

into stanzaic receptacles, embody the shape and spirit of paintings by De Chirico, and spin like a top around a still center. Although Swenson was clearly engaged in the experimental enterprise to a degree that would charm any scientist, her poetic experimentation was more a means than an end. A language poet before the phrase was coined, she surely would have disdained the label, for her poems are clearly ‘‘about’’ more than the words themselves. . . . While Swenson did not go out of her way to disclose her lesbianism, neither did she go out of her way to hide it. Relatively late in her life, she expressed her pleasure at the possibility of having certain poems understood in their proper context, but she was apparently less happy about the implication of being a ‘‘lesbian poet,’’ with ‘‘lesbian’’ as the modifier or defining term. Swenson’s poem, ‘‘To Confirm a Thing,’’ dated 1957, appeared in Joan Larkin and Elly Bulkin’s anthology, Amazon Poetry, the first major collection of its kind, which came out in 1975. Swenson accepted the editors’ invitation to include a sample of her work and suggested this particular poem, which after its appearance in To Mix with Time (1963), according to Swenson, ‘‘has never been paid any particular attention that I know of.’’ She notes as well in her reply to Larkin: ‘‘To me the statement it makes doesn’t seem at all obscure, but perhaps the metaphors constitute a thicker veil than I expected’’ (letter 2 Sept. 1975) . . . . The oldest child of ten born to Swedish immigrant parents who settled in Utah, she was raised with a rigid set of expectations of how boys and girls should behave. Having grown up in a family of practicing Mormons, it is certainly

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not surprising that Swenson would show an overactive attention to ‘‘delicious sin.’’ The theme of the recalcitrant child is a strong presence throughout her work in poems like ‘‘The Centaur.’’ Indeed, the word ‘‘tomboy’’ seems to have been created with Swenson in mind. Her boyish, close-cropped hair is a constant on the dust jacket of each new book. This healthy resistance to authority, however, did not stand in the way of her filial loyalty. From the stringencies of her family of origin to the self-made family of women implied in such poems as ‘‘The Beauty of the Head,’’ Swenson seems to have negotiated the boundaries of her various worlds with remarkable grace. Swenson’s eight surviving siblings attended her memorial tribute, given in March 1991 by the Academy of American Poets, for whom Swenson had served as chancellor from 1980 until her death in 1989, replacing Elizabeth Bishop in that post. Swenson’s sister, Margaret Swenson Woodbury, one of her younger siblings, was among the presenters who offered reminiscences and read selected poems from the body of Swenson’s work. Woodbury read the poem ‘‘I Look at My Hand’’ (Iconographs, 1970), in which the physical inheritance from parents is literally traced down to the fingertips. In another poem, ‘‘Night Visits with the Family’’ (Things Taking Place, 1978), variant dreams are attributed to a multitude of family members all identified by first name, including May and Margaret. The collective presence of the family group takes on added significance in the poem ‘‘Feel Me’’ (Iconographs, 1970), in which, through a combination of apparent autobiography and linguistic analysis, Swenson/the speaker recalls ‘‘our father’s’’ last words and puzzles through several possible interpretations: ‘‘Feel me to do right,’’ our father said on his deathbed. We did not quite know—in fact, not at all— what he meant. His last whisper was spent as through a slot on a wall. He left us a key, but how did it fit? . . . The microscopic attention to a small syntactic unit here stands in for the larger emotional work of grief, as if to say, in the absence of any clear message, we fix on the little we have. One possible interpretation to which the speaker does not allude is that, instead of (or in addition to) addressing the family members in his presence,

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the father might be offering a prayer for God’s grace. The implicit ‘‘you,’’ in this case, would be God. ‘‘Feel me to [have done] right’’ (with my life) would then be the sense of his words. This seemingly intentional misreading reflects a narrowing perspective which sidesteps the extremity of the situation. If the father is talking to someone other than ‘‘us,’’ ‘‘we’’ lose the exercise which gives meaning to ‘‘our’’ grief. Given Swenson’s background, it seems likely that she assumes an implicit dialogue between ‘‘our father’’ on his deathbed and ‘‘Our Father,’’ the heavenly maker, to whom the earthbound family members are denied access. In another family poem, ‘‘That the Soul May Wax Plump,’’ Swenson writes: ‘‘Mother’s work before she died was self-purification / a regimen of near starvation, to be worthy to go / to Our Father, Whom she confused (or, more aptly, fused) / with our father, in Heaven long since . . . ’’ (Things Taking Place, 1978). The internal dialogue was a useful strategy for Swenson in grappling with the important questions of her own life. In the previously unpublished poem, ‘‘Manyone Flying,’’ she returns to a favorite visual format—the symmetrical arrangement of lines built around a narrow column of white space. In this instance, the structure suggests both the visual formation of birds in flight and the verbal precipice over which the speaker is poised. Swenson’s notation on this poem tells us that she started it on a plane flight to Utah for a family visit. It is not surprising that this situation would evoke a soliloquy which traces the speaker’s role as both loner and member of the flock, perpetually flying from one life to another and wondering at the need for such flight: Out on the ragged edge flying lonely Not all alone not that brave or foolish or self-sufficient or self-believing In the middle In other poems, Swenson tackles metaphysical questions with an ironic spin that is gently irreverent. Just as ‘‘Feel Me’’ begins with a key that does not seem to fit in any known door, an earlier poem, ‘‘The Key to Everything’’ (Another Animal, 1954), looks at the hopeless task of the eternal seeker for answers. Here, Swenson uses breathless, unpunctuated verse paragraphs to characterize such an individual, ‘‘waiting for / the right person the doctor or / the mother or / the person with the name you keep / mumbling in your sleep . . . .’’ This is the kind of poem one would love to thrust in the face of New Age

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friends, particularly for the impact of its final lines: ‘‘ . . . no once you’d / get there you’d / remember and love me / of course I’d / be gone by then I’d / be far away’’ (New and Selected). The first two poems in To Mix with Time (1963) are entitled ‘‘The Universe’’ and ‘‘God.’’ As Alicia Ostriker has pointed out, there may be no other poet with the audacity to use such titles, and it may be the quality Anthony Hecht refers to as ‘‘calculated naivete´’’ which allows Swenson to pull off the gesture. But Swenson is a child here in Blake’s sense of wonderment before the infinite. And, like Whitman, her first poetic impulse is to celebrate. Her early short story, ‘‘Appearances’’ (one of two she published in her lifetime), sets up a dialogue between a physician and a visual artist that embodies Swenson’s continuing stance. ‘‘‘After all,’’’ the story opens in the tired, paternalistic voice of the doctor, ‘‘‘we are no longer children.’’’ The artist, that callow youth, responds, ‘‘‘On the contrary, I believe that we are all still children.’’’ The artist then refines his position, exalting the role of the senses in coming to terms with ‘‘‘a mysterious and lavish power veining everything in nature, spilling free and raw from every stone and leaf’’’ (New Directions, 1951). Peter Pan, both ageless and androgynous, remains the essential archetype, with nature a positive force that cannot be denied. It is that persistent spirit which leads me to resist a reading of Swenson’s work and life that belabors the idea of internalized homophobia or self-hatred. Her absolute willingness to confound gender expectations for subject matter, genre, and style far outweighs her apparent ambivalence about being politically ‘‘out.’’ The first Swenson book I purchased was To Mix with Time, and this was long before I called myself a lesbian or saw her work collected in Amazon Poetry. I remember standing in the bookstore, transfixed by these lines from ‘‘Out of My Head’’: If I could get out of my head and into the world. What am I saying? Out of my head? Isn’t my head in the world?

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That immediate move to stand the question itself ‘‘on its head,’’ the refusal to separate ‘‘head’’ from ‘‘world,’’ the enactment of this separation by means of a continental divide of white space—these are qualities that disarmed me then and now. As a teenager with a hyperactive intelligence and a bent toward poetry, I sensed in Swenson’s work the possibilities of a future I did not yet have the words to imagine—one in which I could be ‘‘in my head’’ and ‘‘in the world’’ at the same time and in equal measure. This lesson, of course, is the opposite of what parents and teachers had to say to smart girls—that experience was something we had to go out there and ‘‘get’’ if we wanted to fulfill ourselves as women. Swenson’s work and life palpably contradict the voice of authority. Somehow, finding out that she was a lesbian simply confirmed what I already knew. Swenson had an innate distrust for the separation of thinking and feeling states. What she recognized, instead, was the seductive energy of words and ideas, the sensual allure of exploration and discovery, the sexiness of a machine’s (or a poem’s) working parts. It is the word made flesh and the flesh made word—that moment of union protracted in a body of work. For these reasons, Swenson’s readers tend to offer an unqualified admiration that is closer to love. We love the poet who brings us closest to our own true nature—who shows us, through her example, what it means to be truly alive. Source: Sue Russell, ‘‘A Mysterious and Lavish Power: How Things Continue to Take Place in the Work of May Swenson,’’ in Kenyon Review, Vol. 16, No. 3, Summer 1994, pp. 128–39.

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Hollander, John, ‘‘May Swenson’s Massive Panoply,’’ in The Work of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 1997, pp. 292–93. Howard, Richard, ‘‘May Swenson,’’ in Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950, enlarged edition, Atheneum, 1980, p. 608. Knudson, R. R., The Wonderful Pen of May Swenson, Macmillan, 1993, pp. 28, 34, 91–92, 100. Kronzek, Elizabeth, ‘‘Mormonism (1815–1850),’’ in American Eras, Vol. 3, The Revolutionary Era, 1754– 1783, Gale Research, 1997–1998. Marc, David, ‘‘Beat Generation,’’ in Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia, http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761553702/Beat_Generation.html (accessed September 8, 2008). McElveen, Idris, ‘‘May Swenson,’’ in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 5, No. 2, American Poets Since World War II, edited by Donald J. Greiner, Gale Research, 1980, pp. 310, 312. Ostriker, Alicia, ‘‘May Swenson and the Shapes of Speculation,’’ in Writing Like a Woman, University of Michigan Press, 1983, pp. 87, 89, 90–91; originally published in American Poetry Review, Vol. 7, No. 2, 1978. Spooner, Michael, ‘‘How Everything Happens: Notes on May Swenson’s Theory of Writing,’’ in Body My House: May Swenson’s Work and Life, edited by Paul Crumbley and Patricia M. Grant, Utah State University Press, 2006, p. 160. Stanford, Ann, ‘‘May Swenson: The Art of Perceiving,’’ in Southern Review, new series, Vol. 5, 1969, p. 64. Swenson, May, ‘‘The Centaur,’’ in Nature: Poems Old and New, Houghton Mifflin, 1994, pp. 13–15; originally published in Western Review, Vol. 20, 1956, pp. 100–101. ———, ‘‘An Interview with Cornelia Draves and Mary Jane Fortunato,’’ in Made with Words, edited by Gardner McFall, University of Michigan Press, 1998, pp. 113–14; originally published in New York Quarterly, Vol. 19, 1977.

SOURCES Crumbley, Paul, ‘‘May Swenson and Other Animals: Her Poetics of Natural Selection,’’ in Body My House: May Swenson’s Work and Life, edited by Paul Crumbley and Patricia M. Grant, Utah State University Press, 2006, pp. 139, 140.

Zona, Kristin Hotelling, ‘‘May Swenson’s Performative Poetics,’’ in Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and May Swenson: The Feminist Poetics of Self-Restraint, University of Michigan Press, 2002, pp. 123, 124, 134.

Gould, Jean, Modern American Women Poets, Dodd, Mead, 1984, p. 76. Grabher, Gudrun M., ‘‘De-Cartesianizing the Universe: May Swenson’s Design of Wor(l)ds,’’ in Body My House: May Swenson’s Work and Life, edited by Paul Crumbley and Patricia M. Grant, Utah State University Press, 2006, p. 82. Hogue, Cynthia, ‘‘Material Girl: May Swenson’s Logopoetic Materialism,’’ in Body My House: May Swenson’s Work and Life, edited by Paul Crumbley and Patricia M. Grant, Utah State University Press, 2006, pp. 122–23.

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FURTHER READING Arrington, Leonard J., and Davis Bitton, The Mormon Experience: A History of the Latter-Day Saints, University of Illinois Press, 1992. This account of the Mormons was written by members of the Mormon church, but it is generally regarded as being objective.

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Campbell, James, This Is the Beat Generation: New YorkSan Francisco-Paris, University of California Press, 2001. This introductory account traces the lives of the leading Beat writers and describes the movement they created. Evans, Sara M., Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America, revised edition, Free Press, 1997. This historical study traces the role of women

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in the United States from the seventeenth century to the late twentieth century. Koestler, Arthur, The Act of Creation, Penguin, 1990. Originally published in 1964, this book is a classic study of creativity. Koestler explores true and false inspiration by, among other things, looking at accounts of how famous scientists made their discoveries.

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Follower ‘‘Follower’’ was first published in Seamus Heaney’s 1966 anthology Death of a Naturalist. This first book of Heaney’s career established his reputation as a poet almost overnight, and ‘‘Follower’’ is usually singled out as among the finest poems in that volume and among the most important of Heaney’s poems from throughout his career. It establishes the main themes of Heaney’s work, a poetry that is rooted in a sense of place in the rural Ireland of his boyhood and that laments the loss of old traditions that inevitably disappear among modern ways of life. Heaney considers that his family’s traditional connection to the land and work as peasant farmers has come to an end in the modern world and must be continued by transformation into poetry. He uses the scholarly metaphor of pygmies standing on the shoulders of giants to suggest his indebtedness as a writer to his forebears’ tradition of labor. He has since shaped a career based on navigation between tradition and the modern world, and on the transformation and translation of works of mythic tradition into modern English.

SEAMUS HEANEY 1966

‘‘Follower’’ has been widely republished in literary anthologies and in collections of Heaney’s works, for instance in Heaney’s Opened Ground: Poems 1966–1996.

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Seamus Heaney (David Levenson / Getty Images Entertainment / Getty Images)

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Seamus Heaney was born on April 13, 1939, on the family farm of Mossbawn in County Derry, Northern Ireland. His family was Catholic, part of the minority population in Northern Ireland. He initially attended the local parish school, but soon won a scholarship to St. Columb’s College, a prestigious Catholic boarding school in the city of Derry. He went on to take a First in English (the equivalent of an American bachelor’s degree with honors) from the Queen’s University of Belfast in 1961. He worked for two years on a teaching degree at St. Joseph’s Teacher Training College, which included a year teaching English at a high School in Belfast. During this time he began to publish poems in local magazines. In 1963 he began lecturing in English at St. Joseph’s. He also entered a circle of young poets patronized by Philip Hobsbaum, an established poet and a lecturer at Queen’s University of Belfast. Under his patronage Heaney quickly came to the attention of prominent critics and published his first

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professional volume of poetry, Death of a Naturalist, including ‘‘Follower,’’ in 1966. After this he would publish a new anthology of poetry every few years and constantly move on to more and more prestigious teaching posts. Between 1972 and 1980 he taught at Carysfort College in Dublin, which enabled him to move with his family (he married the teacher and writer Marie Devlin in 1965 and had sons Michael and Christopher in 1966 and 1968) to the Catholic Republic of Ireland. Acclaimed by critics as among the greatest living poets, in 1982 he began teaching at Harvard University and in 1989 at Oxford, maintaining his permanent residence in Dublin. Since 1994 he has made his living as a public speaker, no longer needing to teach to support himself. In 1995 Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The following anthology, Spirit Level, was awarded the prestigious Whitbread Prize, an honor of nearly the same rank in British letters as the Booker Prize, which, being awarded exclusively to novels, Heaney is ineligible for. His translation of Beowulf won another Whitbread in 1999. He has won innumerable lesser prizes and been awarded honorary doctoral degrees by Fordham University, Harvard University, and other schools. Of Heaney’s later poetry anthologies, perhaps the most important is Station Island (1984). Organized around his reenactment of the medieval practice of pilgrimage, Heaney considers in this volume the place and character of the poet in the modern world. One section of the book is devoted to poems inspired by the medieval Irish myth, The Madness of Sweeney, of which Heaney had published an interpretation, Sweeney Astray, the previous year. Heaney’s adaptations of Greek drama, The Cure at Troy (1990), based on Sophocles’ Philoctetes, and The Burial at Thebes (2004), based on Sophocles’ Antigone, have also been well received. Since winning the Nobel Prize, Heaney has done an increasing number of translations out of Old and Middle English. Of these the most important is undoubtedly his rendering of Beowulf (1999), which is recognized as one of his most significant and influential works in any genre.

POEM SUMMARY ‘‘Follower’’ consists of six four-line stanzas, or quatrains. Each stanza follows an abab rhyme scheme, meaning the first and third line of each

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stanza rhyme, as do the second and fourth. No particular metrical scheme is followed, and the length of the lines is determined by the ideas they contain and by grammatical breaks.

Stanza 1 Heaney takes as his subject a description of his father plowing a field. He does not use a tractor. No modern device intrudes on the scene. His father cuts through the field with an oldfashioned hand plow drawn by a horse. The use of horses (most likely a team) indicates some level of prosperity since a less successful farmer would be forced to use a cheaper draft animal such as an ox. The plough horses are well trained and respond to the plowman’s voice command. The metaphor of the second and third lines is somewhat odd. The speaker views his father in profile and describes the curve of his body bent over in the act of plowing as the curve of a sail billowing out from attachment points at the handles of the plough and at the trench being cut into the sod by the plough blade. But, of course, the billowing shape in this instance is coming off the back of the plow and would suggest motion contrary to the forward progress of the plough. But, no doubt, the image is not used for its literal applicability but for its suggestion of the smooth motion of sailing, propelled by nature rather than a man-made device such as a tractor engine. The transformation of the plowman into a sail suggests that the plough as a whole is sailing over the field like a ship, and one cannot help but think that it is a vessel for the preservation of tradition, modeled, perhaps on the metaphor of the ship of the Church as the vessel preserving the faithful and Catholic tradition on the stormtossed sea of the world. The fact that the father is stretched between the plow and the cut he is making in the ground also suggests the special connection of the farmer to the earth.

Stanza 2 The second stanza develops the theme of the father’s expertise as a farmer. The process being described is a plough running over the earth to create a fold in which seed can be sown to germinate and hence produce a crop. The specialized blade that cuts into the soil and turns it over is called a moldboard. This is supported by a wooden framework with handles that allow the farmer to guide the plowing and a rigging at the head to enable the horses to pull the plough. The blade and framework together make up the

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plough. The pointed blade attached to the front of the moldboard that does the cutting is called a ploughshare, although Heaney makes a point of referring to it by an Irish dialectical word that is only a homonym to the English word ‘sock’; that is, it has the same sound but a completely different meaning and origin. The trailing part of the moldboard that actually turns the earth is likened by a conventional metaphor that is really a technical term to the similarly shaped anatomy of a bird. As his father plows, he leaves a solid swath of turned over soil, as opposed to a trail of broken clods of earth. This emphasizes again his father’s special skill at his work, as does his control over the horses. There is a striking enjambment between the second and third stanzas. Enjambment is the continuation of sense and grammatical units across the boundaries of metrical or formal units in poetry. In this case not only a sentence but a clause extends across the stanza break. This is a poetic representation of the continuous action of plowing: just as the plowman leaves a continuous path of sliced up earth, the poet keeps going smoothly across the stanzas. Given Heaney’s love of the archaic, probably the effect he had in mind was the boustrophedon style of writing. When alphabetic writing was first introduced into Archaic Greece from the Near East, there was considerable uncertainty among scribes about the direction of the writing itself. Some chose to start at the left and write toward the right in the way that is standard in European languages (probably because of the prevalence of right-handedness). Others, however, preserved the Semitic practice of writing from right to left. A few examples survive in boustrophedon, in which the first line of a text reads from left to right, but the second from right to left, the third from left to right again, and so on, the scribe always writing the first letter of the next line directly underneath the last letter of the previous line. This type of writing is called boustrophedon from Greek words denoting the motion of plowing oxen back and forth across a field.

Stanza 3 The third stanza reiterates the early themes of the poem: the father’s skill and perhaps the nautical metaphor of the first stanza, if there are references to the age of exploration under sail in the sense of navigating through the field requiring the making of a new map. The sense

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of repetition itself is important since once the plowman has crossed the field he must turned around and exactly repeat his procedure over and over, back and forth, until the entire field is plowed.

Stanza 4 So far the speaker has viewed his father’s plowing through the eyes of memory. In the fourth stanza he suddenly sees and shows the reader his younger self, perhaps four or five years old, before he would have entered his parish school, playing in the field where his father is working. In the traditional society that Heaney was destined to leave as soon as he attended a prestigious boarding school in Derry, this is how children would have learned the routines and skills of labor on the farm, by playing and then working with their parents as they performed their age-old tasks. The likening of the long cuts made into the ground by his father’s plowing through the waves left by the passage of a ship may be taken as a reemphasis of the earlier nautical metaphor. Heaney describes his young self as awkward and uncertain, unable to follow in his father’s footsteps. But his father picks him up and lets him ride on his shoulders. These are powerful metaphors establishing the relationship between father and son. Heaney is unable to go forward in the tradition of his family and his father, but he is nevertheless supported and uplifted by that tradition.

Stanza 5 The fifth stanza deals with the speaker’s incapacity to imitate his father’s way of life. This is his desire, but his imitation is childish and exaggerated. He cannot become a plowman but can only follow behind the plowman. His father casts a shadow larger than his young body, a reference to the idea of being overshadowed by one’s predecessors.

Stanza 6 In the first sentence of the last stanza Heaney characterizes his young self as a positive distraction, getting in the way of his father, and never able to keep up with him owing to his unstable awkwardness. Then, changing his perspective and tone, the speaker says that now the situation is reversed; his father is the awkward follower. Heaney’s father was a peasant farmer, a man of tradition, who cannot make his way in the modern world as Heaney—a professor, writer, and

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poet—can do. His father’s tradition is dead and his father with it, but yet it stands behind Heaney in his encounter with modernity. The fit between the two worlds is as awkward from the viewpoint of the modern as it was from the viewpoint of tradition: Heaney’s childhood gracelessness was a foreshadowing of this. Young Heaney would not leave his father’s footsteps, but playfully and haltingly dogged him. His father will now, however, stay behind Heaney, supporting him as a bridge to an imperishable tradition, however haltingly.

THEMES Tradition Much of Heaney’s work is devoted to what, for want of a better word, may be called tradition. Tradition is the set of customs that are inherited by a culture and give it its identity. In ‘‘Follower,’’ Heaney makes the particular craft of farming—his father’s excellence at its tasks, as well as the close association between father and a son made possible by the traditional way of life in which a son was essentially apprenticed to his father for education—stand for tradition as a whole. A great deal of Heaney’s later work has involved the adaptation or translation into modern English of works vital to the Western tradition including stories from Irish mythology, Greek tragedy, and the AngloSaxon epic Beowulf. In his own poetry Heaney often laments the loss of tradition. ‘‘Follower’’ is one of the most important examples of Heaney’s treatment of tradition. It describes in loving, idealized terms the agricultural way of life that represents tradition for Heaney, in particular his father’s way of life as he knew it in his own childhood. In the last stanza of the poem, there is a stark transition to Heaney’s adult viewpoint, where his embrace of modernity and progress has jarringly pulled him out of the traditional way of life and left it a staggering wreck shambling behind him.

The Shoulders of Giants In the fourth stanza of ‘‘Follower,’’ Heaney describes his young self riding piggy-back on his father’s shoulders while the elder is plowing. This is probably unlikely as a physical fact (though not impossible), but it is best taken as an allegorical reference to one of the most

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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY 

Look through several art books with illustrations of genre paintings that provide images of peasant life in Northwestern Europe from the Middle Ages to the present. Then produce your own artistic interpretation of the characters in Heaney’s ‘‘Follower.’’



What traditions does your family have? What have you learned from your parents and relatives? Write a poem describing how the ideas and wisdom you have inherited from your family will support what you intend to accomplish in the future.



Think of a period in history that you would like to visit. Write a short story detailing what it would be like if you went there and how you would influence the citizenry with your twenty-first century knowledge.



Brian Desmond’s 1962 film Playboy of the Western World, an adaptation of the 1907 play by Irish playwright J. M. Synge, presents a satirical view of rural Irish life. Watch this film and discuss in a review how this film either illustrates or contrasts with the world mourned by Heaney in ‘‘Follower.’’

important themes of Western literature and culture, the idea that if modern people see farther than the ancients, it is because they are pygmies standing on the shoulders of giants. This slogan was first developed during the little Renaissance of the twelfth century when Western Europe received a great mass of Greek literature in Arabic translation, immensely enriching medieval culture. The phrase was coined by Bernard of Chartres, as quoted by Jacques Le Goff in The Birth of Europe, in the form ‘‘we are dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants,’’ and has been repeated countless times since then. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance it meant that contemporary achievements were small and weak compared to those of Classical antiquity and that anything that seemed an advance over the

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ancients was only a tiny addition to the GrecoRoman foundation. The phrase continued to be popular during the Scientific Revolution, but in the less radical sense of indicating that each generation of researchers owes an enormous debt to their predecessors. In this sense the phrase has been adopted as the slogan of the Google Scholar service, which is dedicated to searching scholarly periodical literature on the Internet: ‘‘Stand on the shoulders of giants.’’ In more recent times, the Renaissance slogan has been used to criticize modernity. The cynical short story writer and essayist Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) in his ‘‘Prattle’’ column in the San Francisco Examiner, used it to highlight the supposed insignificance of modern culture compared to that of the ancients: My friends, we are pigmies and barbarians. We have hardly the rudiments of a true civilization; compared with the splendor of which we catch dim glimpses in the fading past, ours are as an illumination of tallow candles. We know no more than the ancients; we only know other things; but nothing in which is an assurance of perpetuity, and nothing which is truly wisdom. Our vaunted elixir vitae is the art of printing with movable types. What good will those do when posterity, struck by the inevitable intellectual blight, shall have ceased to read what is printed? Our libraries will become their stables, our books their fuel.

In Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883–85), the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche composes a parable in which a dwarf standing upon the soldiers of the ancient lawgiver Zarathustra is nevertheless unable to see the same profound insight that Zarathustra does because he is not only small in stature but also in imagination and vision, suggesting that the relatively small advances in philosophy and culture made since antiquity are insignificant compared to the original base. Heaney’s use of the pygmies on the shoulders of giants motif seems somewhat different again. On the one hand he makes the pairing not of mythological or stereotypical figures, but of a father and son, suggesting a much stronger connection between the two halves of the metaphor than is usual, contradicting the function of the idea of size difference to emphasize the gulf between the ancients and moderns. On the other hand, the entire metaphor of learning falls apart because Heaney’s academic education is in no usual sense dwarfed by his father’s lack of conventional learning. Rather, what Heaney is

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Man ploughing with horses (Ó Ed Young / Corbis)

suggesting by these transformations is that the modern learned culture represented by himself, which is a link to the larger Western traditions of antiquity and the Renaissance, must be in some sense inferior and secondary to the traditional culture represented by his father. It is removed from the direct connection to the earth, which is the source of tradition.

symbolic marriage, it offers an explanation for the sudden appearance of young Heaney, as a sort of earth-born offspring of Ireland. The poem then takes on a dreamlike quality in which Heaney’s birth and maturity, alongside the maturity and decline of his father, the succession of the generations, is compressed into a single moment. It emphasizes Heaney’s rootedness in the tradition of rural Ireland.

Agriculture The literal theme of ‘‘Follower’’ is plowing. This essential agricultural work has been used as a metaphor for the union of man and woman throughout the history of Western literature and going back to Mesopotamian and Egyptian literature. In this usage, the field is conceived of as feminine and the plough the masculine force. Karen Moloney, in Seamus Heaney and the Emblems of Hope has pointed out that the mythological theme of the pre-Christian Irish kings marrying the goddess earth and pledging to protect her as his wife would increasingly concern Heaney in his his later work. If we view the act of plowing in ‘‘Follower’’ as a

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STYLE Metrical Effects Traditionally, poetry in English is marked by a special cadence or rhythm of the language used known as meter. For this purpose every syllable is said to be either stressed or unstressed. The meter consists of the repetition of metrical units known as feet: an iamb, for instance, is a foot consisting of an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable. The most common line of poetry in English is the iambic pentameter, that is, a line consisting of five iambs. It is almost

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possible to resolve the lines of Heaney’s ‘‘Follower’’ into lines of iambic quadrameter (lines with four iambs), though with a few oddly placed pentameter lines. Given the overwhelmingly iambic character of ordinary spoken English, however, it seems more likely that Heaney is using more contemporary techniques of composition and abandoning meter as an element of the poem. He does use some metrical effects; for example, the last stanza of the poem describes awkward lurching motions and is heavy with trochees, or feet consisting of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable, to suggest the unnatural movements.

Abab Rhyme Scheme Rhyme was a native characteristic of Arabic poetry that was introduced during the Middle Ages into French and thence other Western European languages by troubadour poets who moved across the language border between Arabic and the Romance languages in northern Spain. Rhyme consists of having the sound at the end of one line, from the last accented syllable until its end, repeated in another line. Heaney follows this convention quite faithfully, with an abab rhyme scheme in each four-line stanza, meaning the first line rhymes with the third, and the second with the fourth. However, he frequently only rhymes the last syllable, not going back to the last accented syllable, and in many cases only matches long or short vowels rather than using syllables with the same vowels.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT Heaney’s ‘‘Follower’’ concerns the transition from a traditional way of life to a new way of life embedded in modernity. For Western civilization as a whole, this process began during the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century. For Heaney’s family and for the poet himself, this change occurred in the course of Heaney’s own life and education. In a traditional culture such as the one in which Heaney grew up in rural Ulster in the early 1940s, most people accepted the culture they were part of as given, not something to be questioned or examined. Life was based on closely held human relationships, not only within families but between individuals of differing classes, such as landowners and peasants,

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whose interactions created the economic fabric of culture. An individual’s place in society was largely determined by his ancestry, with some exceptions, including peasant boys who became priests or sailors. Almost everyone lived as peasants, whose lives and livelihood were inextricably bound up with the natural world through their work as farmers. The perception then of an ideal life was a satisfying mixture of physical labor and wisdom that allowed one to successfully navigate society as it existed. Larger issues such as religion were also determined by family tradition. By and large culture was fixed and unchanging. This was seen to be good because it reflected a moral hierarchy and tradition that supported and transcended human existence; the individual led a good life by fulfilling his place in the societal order. Heaney describes his boyhood life in this kind of environment in Crediting Poetry, the lecture he gave in acceptance of his Nobel Prize in 1995. He cherishes the satisfied isolation of his peasant family: In the nineteen-forties, when I was the eldest child of an ever growing family in rural County Derry, we crowded together in the three rooms of a traditional thatched farmstead and lived a kind of den life which was more or less emotionally and intellectually proofed against the outside world.

To his boyhood self, the world seemed a place full of magic, which we may understand to mean animated with belief and meaning. The only way in which the outside world intruded was the single modern device in the family’s life, the shortwave radio. Even this seemed to the young Heaney a source of divination and miracle, as magical voices talked about far-off events in a war that might as well be happening in the land of ‘‘Once upon a time.’’ ‘‘But it was not only the earth that shook for us: the air around and above us was alive and signaling us as well,’’ he recalled in his lecture. He did not at that time view the radio and the modern world it was a connection to as agents of change. Before he was sent to a modern school, where his parents hoped he would find the means of a life better than their own, or at least a place in the world outside their retreating livelihood, he accepted the order of the world as it was, as it had always been. ‘‘The wartime, in other words, was pre-reflective time for me. Pre-literate too. Pre-historical in its way.’’

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COMPARE & CONTRAST 

1940s: After the period 1920–25, when Ireland was partitioned into Northern Ireland, which continued as part of Great Britain, and the newly independent Irish Free State, political violence in Ireland sinks to a very low level. 1960s: Northern Ireland is entering a period termed ‘‘The Troubles,’’ a time characterized by violence between Catholic and Protestant paramilitary factions, violence that also involved and the British authorities.

for a large segment of the economy in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Today: The economy of the Republic of Ireland has undergone a high-tech boom since the 1990s and has become one the wealthiest (per capita) countries in the world. Northern Ireland has benefited from the prosperity of its neighbor, and from relative peace, but it lags behind economically.

1960s: Despite the presence of industrial centers in the north, farming still accounts

1940s: Education beyond the equivalent of grade school is rare in rural Ireland. 1960s: Education beyond the equivalent of grade school is still rare in rural Ireland and common only in the industrialized cities of Northern Ireland. Today: Education through the equivalent of high school is compulsory and college and graduate education are offered to all Irish citizens free of charge. The same is true in Northern Ireland.

Modernity brought dramatic change to every area of life, undermining and replacing almost every element of traditional ways of life, first in Western Europe and then increasingly throughout the whole world as Western culture became dominant in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment set about to examine all of the certainties that underpinned life in traditional culture—the very things that seemed to make civilized life safe and meaningful—and to expose these traditions as false or meaningless. The very nature of the universe was changed by the heliocentric revolution. The social order was overturned and shown to be built on injustice rather than justice by the French Revolution and such Enlightenment treatises as Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791), Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract (1761), and eventually Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Communist Manifesto

(1848). Social support for traditional religions also eroded as educated classes embraced deism and even atheism, while simple irreligion has become increasingly widespread, with, for instance, a dramatic decrease in church attendance in Western Europe throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Work once followed the natural rhythms of agricultural life and families worked together on farms with parents acting as teachers to their children, instructing them in the skills necessary for their lives. But the vast majority of workers were sooner or later forced to leave the land for employment in factories. This meant laboring at unfulfilling and often dangerous, repetitive work tending machines; it also meant separation of the family with fathers isolated for long hours in the factories. The twentieth century brought about two world wars, which turned the power of industrial production to the destruction of human life.

Today: Political tensions and violence have eased considerably following a number of negotiated settlements. 

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1940s: Ulster, or Northern Ireland, has a more prosperous economy than the largely rural south because of its concentration of heavy industry, especially shipbuilding in Belfast.



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CRITICAL OVERVIEW From the very beginning of Heaney’s efforts to write poetry, established poets such as Philip Hobsbaum and critics like Edward Lucie-Smith acted as his patrons, so his work was quickly published and immediately gained widespread critical acceptance in the mid-1960s. Since the 1980s, he has regularly been called the greatest Irish poet since William Butler Yeats and the greatest living poet writing in English. James Simmons was an early associate of Heaney, who studied with him under Hobsbaum. His article ‘‘The Trouble with Seamus,’’ published in Seamus Heaney: A Collection of Critical Essays, breaks with the easy acceptance Heaney quickly gained in critical circles. He feels that Heaney, though capable of writing a few nice individual poems, was ruined by his early advancement, never having been forced to do the groundwork necessary to become a great poet. He is dismissive especially of Heaney’s first volume of verse: ‘‘Most of the poems in that first book, Death of a Naturalist (1966), have the air of diligently done school exercises lacking any vision, passion or intellect.’’ He excepts from this, however, ‘‘Follower,’’ for its vivid, flowing language and what he terms its outspokenness. Elmer Andrews’s essay, ‘‘The Gift and the Craft,’’ in Twentieth Century Literature, interprets ‘‘Follower’’ as a demarcation between two worlds: the unexamined, illiterate life of traditional Irishmen into which Heaney was born, and the self-consciously reflective world of English literature into which Heaney was educated, where direct experience is impossible and sensation must be mediated by thought. In ‘‘The Spirit’ Protest,’’ from Seamus Heaney: A Collection of Critical Essays, Andrews also singles out ‘‘Follower’’ as unusual among Heaney’s poetry. In his view the poem ‘‘highlights the way family relationships can be a burden as well as sustaining. Here, old ways and old allegiances prevent free movement and personal development.’’ Alan Peacock, in an essay titled ‘‘Meditations: Poet as Translator, Poet as Seer,’’ also in Seamus Heaney: A Collection of Critical Essays, takes up the same theme, seeing the poem as defining limits the poet imposes on himself because he is unwilling to betray the tradition represented by his father. Peacock’s interpretation of the poem’s last stanza is standard, seeing the father’s halting gait as an admission that Heaney is

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moving away from his beloved tradition. John Boly, a widely published professor of English at Marquette University, has offered in an article in Twentieth Century Literature a different interpretation of this final passage of the poem: ‘‘The lurching father suggests a voodoo zombie dug up by some malevolent Pedro loa and set to work in the plantations of Haiti. With no will of his own, the heroic ploughman loses control of his own limbs.’’ This view has not been echoed by other critics.

CRITICISM Bradley A. Skeen Skeen is a classics professor. In this essay, he considers ‘‘Follower’’ in relation to romantic and post-romantic concepts of tradition. Heaney’s ‘‘Follower’’ laments the loss of contact with a tradition of family, of place, and of long ages past that nevertheless sits beneath and sustains his poetical work. The boundary between the traditional way of life that has shaped human culture and modernity was drawn for the educated classes of Europe toward the end of the eighteenth century. The change from tradition to modernity has come to the rest of the world as each place has contacted and absorbed modern Western culture. For Heaney it came when he won a scholarship to St. Columb’s Catholic boarding school in Derry and he was thrust from the family farm into a new world of learning. ‘‘Follower’’ is about the loss of tradition. In fact, the main theme of Heaney’s poetic career is the sense of loss that accompanies moving away from tradition. His poems often focus on the details of his family life in his childhood before his personal break with tradition. He has tried to create an English in his poems accessible to modern audiences, but nevertheless drawn equally from the language heard in his childhood from family and neighbors, and from the heroic and archaic AngloSaxon he studied at university. He sees the unity between those two roots of his language not in their shared tradition, which is slight, but in their shared possession of a tradition in contrast to the more artificial language of polite English society, often called BBC English because it is recognized as the creation of a specific and very modern consensus. For this reason the magnum opus of the latter part of Heaney’s

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WHAT DO I READ NEXT?

A MAN LIKE HEANEY, WHO DESPERATELY LONGS FOR TRADITION, CAN NEVER PARTICIPATE IN IT AGAIN ONCE THE MODERN WORLD HAS CAST HIM OUT OF HIS EDEN; HE MUST FOREVER BE A







Heaney’s 1999 translation of Beowulf is acknowledged as the masterpiece of his later career. His style of translation points out similarities he sees between the epic diction of the Old English verse and the conversational speech of the peasant farmers he grew up among. Kathleen Raine’s Collected Poems, 1935– 1980, published in 1981, presents the primary works by a leading self-avowed traditionalist poet who is interested in many of the same themes as Heaney. Some Experiences of an Irish RM, published in 1899 by Edith Somerville and Violet Martin, is a series of comic short stories concerning an English Resident Magistrate attempting to bring the benefits of modern British civilization to the Irish countryside. It was followed by two more collections, Further Experiences of an Irish RM (1908) and In Mr. Knox’s Country (1915). Most of the stories in these volumes were adapted into a long-running British television series, The Irish RM by Ulster Television in the 1980s.

Conor McCarthy’s Seamus Heaney and Medieval Poetry (2008) treats Heaney’s use of medieval myth and poetry in his translations and adaptations.  William Butler Yeats is the most famous Irish poet to precede Heaney. Like Heaney, he is an Irish poet and a Nobel Laureate who dealt extensively with Irish myth and tradition. His poems have been frequently collected and republished, for instance in the edition edited by Richard J. Finneran, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989). 

career is the translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, which he rendered into the remembered language of his youth. Through that work, adaptations of Irish myth (Sweeney Astray, 1983), and Greek dramas (The Cure at Troy, 1990;

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STRANGER IN HIS OWN LAND.’’

The Burial at Thebes, 2004), Heaney attempts to speak in the lost idiom of tradition. But what is this tradition whose loss so concerns Heaney? Tradition is the story that a culture tells about itself, that defines itself and expresses the hopes and aspirations of a people. Tradition tells this story not only in the words of poets but in every moment of life, as Heaney insists, even in the farmer plowing and digging. Tradition is true in the sense of giving an expression of cultural identity. However, it may well contain historical, mythological, or folkloric information that is not factually true from the viewpoint of logic or from a scientific examination of evidence. The apparent falsification of tradition by academic investigation does not make it any less vital. Balancing the idea of a tradition as true with the fact that it is not true makes it impossible for modern people to participate in tradition unself-consciously, as premodern people did, and leads to alienation from tradition. The alienation of modernity arises from the perception that life in a modern industrializing society fragmented tradition, that capitalism replaced class structure with class warfare, and that science and the Enlightenment held up traditional social institutions and their associated belief systems to ridicule. The bonds between man and God become ignorant superstition, the corruption of Church officials, and intolerance for freedom of thought; the bonds of man to man become the oppressive tyranny of medieval social hierarchy; the bonds of man to the world become a hindrance to scientific exploration and commercial exploitation. A man like Heaney, who desperately longs for tradition, can never participate in it again once the modern world has cast him out of his Eden; he must forever be a stranger in his own land. Modern people are doomed to stand apart from tradition

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and examine it from the outside, seeing through it and around it, but never again within it. Poetry itself was one of the traditions most dramatically and directly effected by the rise of the modern world. In the traditional world, the poet of the sort who composed Beowulf is a bard. He does not tell the story of himself or of any particular individual but composes epics, or tales of a mythic hero who encounters gods and monsters. He tells the myths and legends that define the very nature of his own culture. He cannot read or write but rather composes his songs through repetition and other literary devices of the oral tradition. Though his artistry is free to shape the brilliance of each performance, he does not speak in his own voice, but in a metalanguage of lines and half-lines of verse composed by generations of bards before him, all of which he holds in his memory, selecting and recombining them into new songs the way ordinary speakers make sentences out of words. The bard holds an honored place within the social hierarchy that governs traditional society, patronized by nobles and kings, but is gratefully heard by the people as a whole at festivals and singing competitions. In the twenty-first century, however, the modern sort of poet must speak in his own unique voice and must speak only his own story: only that isolated truth is given value. The contemporary poet’s relationship to his own culture is one of alienation and conflict. He is cut off from tradition. In this sense, he could not compose a true epic even if he desired to; he could, however, write about the impossibility of composing an epic. Contemporary poetry is, for the most part, read only by other poets and academics (Heaney is the great exception to this, and accounts for about two-thirds of all poetry books sold in the United Kingdom.) Forced by circumstance to be one sort of poet, Heaney perhaps longs to be the other. Reaction against the alienation of traditional European culture effected by the advent of modernity was not long in coming in the form of the romantic movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the twentyfirst century, romanticism is considered a literary movement, but the intellectual force behind it, especially in such philosophical figures as Goethe, Schiller, and Wordsworth, recognized the transformation of culture that was happening. Many positive developments, especially for the individual, came with modernity: increased

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personal freedom, the intellectual certainties of science, modern sanitation, improvements in medicine, the phenomenal growth of knowledge in general, and many other advances. But the romantics nevertheless felt that something was being lost with the passing of tradition. What they aimed at was a logical syllogism, or deductive reasoning, where the thesis of tradition and the antithesis of modernity (both good things by themselves, though in radically different and mutually contradictory ways) could be reconciled because the elementary basis of tradition was still harbored within the soul of humankind. This reconciliation would then produce a wholly new synthesis that would supersede and at the same time combine the best parts of both. However, the synthesis eluded the romantics and modern culture has become increasingly distant from tradition. More recent mainstream reactions to modernity, which may be roughly equated with postmodernism, hold that meaning is more and more invested with the individual and his perception of the world, rather than any objective reality. Even in the case of texts, authorial intent matters little compared to the critic’s perception. Each individual is left alone to create his own world, finally and utterly cut free of the anchor of tradition. A different reaction to modernity is traditionalism. This is a marginal political movement that began at the start of the twentieth century in southern Europe, particularly with the writings of the French intellectual Rene´ Gue´non (1886– 1951) and the German-Swiss philosopher Frithjof Schuon (1907–98). The principles of traditionalism hold that human life derives its meaning from being enmeshed in a tradition that goes back to the earliest civilizations and beyond, ultimately to a source of supernatural revelation such as the Judeo-Christian Bible, the Koran, or the Chinese I-Ching; traditionalism considers all religions to be equally valid expressions of tradition. Traditionalism is less willing than romanticism to compromise with modernity or to see the good in it, but, at the same time, traditionalism lacks any definite answer to the problem of modernity and advocates waiting and preserving tradition, especially links to traditional institutions, insofar as possible until conditions change, making a revival of tradition possible. Though today it is difficult to see how it could be brought about, traditionalism seeks nothing less than a different modernity, one

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that develops in support of, rather than in opposition to, tradition. This view has gained more support in the Islamic world as a political adjunct of the Sufi school than in Western Europe or the United States. The great voice of traditionalism has been the English poet Kathleen Raine (1908– 2003), who used ancient Greek and Christian traditions to express the particularities of her experience, producing a body of work that is in many ways comparable to Heaney’s. Heaney has never associated himself with the traditionalist movement, and given its marginal place in European politics and intellectual life, he may well not even know of its existence. In fact, Heaney has eschewed all involvement with politics since the beginning of the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. As he says in his Nobel address, later published as Crediting Poetry, ‘‘We have terrible proof that pride in the ethnic and religious heritage can quickly degrade into the fascistic.’’ In this way he distances himself from traditionalism as political activism, avoiding the trap some traditionalists fell into. Nevertheless, Heaney’s ideas share many features in common with premises of traditionalism. His poetry is rooted in a specific place, and in the history of that place. In his Nobel lecture, he expressed this in describing a vivid accident that occurred on the morning the announcement of his Nobel Prize was made. He happened to be in Sparta and saw in the museum there a plaque dedicated to the mythical poet Orpheus: The image moved me because of its antiquity and durability, but the description on the card moved me also because it gave a name and credence to that which I see myself as having been engaged upon for the past three decades: ‘‘Votive panel,’’ the identification card said, ‘‘possibly set up to Orpheus by local poet. Local work of the Hellenistic period.’’

He does not limit inspiration to the single place of Derry or Ireland that is his. The voice of each place is equally valid: But it strikes me that it could equally well come out of India or Africa or the Arctic or the Americas. By which I do not mean merely to consign it to the typology of folktales, or to dispute its value by questioning its culturebound status within a multicultural context. On the contrary, its trustworthiness and its travelworthiness have to do with its local setting.

For Heaney, as for the traditionalist, the tradition of any place is as fit a subject of poetry as any other. Heaney’s concept of crediting poetry

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is not an appreciation of poetry, or merely belief in its beauty and importance, but rather a way to use poetry to reattach to the anchor of tradition and stand against the shifting currents of the postmodern world. ‘‘What I was longing for was not quite stability but an active escape from the quicksand of relativism, a way of crediting poetry without anxiety or apology,’’ Heaney explained in his Nobel address. He wishes to embrace poetry without distancing thought from consideration, just as the ancient bards had done, though he knows that as a modern person he cannot do so. Heaney sees himself as another kind of traditional writer, the medieval monk, preserving a tradition he cannot advance. He described it thus to the Nobel audience: . . . For years I was bowed to the desk like some monk bowed over his prie-dieu, some dutiful contemplative pivoting his understanding in an attempt to bear his portion of the weight of the world, knowing himself incapable of heroic virtue or redemptive effect, but constrained by his obedience to his rule to repeat the effort and the posture.

Heaney is a pygmy standing on the shoulders of giants; using a different metaphor, he cannot build a fire himself (that is, write an epic poem), but must content himself with ‘‘blowing up sparks for a meagre heat,’’ as he put it in his Nobel address, in other words, with writing the poetry that he does. At the same time, he is aware that many elements of modernity have grown into monstrous giants themselves and make poetry seem feeble. He wants a poetry that can equal the modern world, a poetry that would have to be myth, the literary form of tradition, and could support and create a different reality than the modern. In the first poem in Death of a Naturalist, ‘‘Digging,’’ Heaney establishes the profession of his father as digging, whether the small scale farming that was his main profession, or in the vegetable garden, or in his outside work cutting peat from a bog. He notes the excellence of his father in this work, a quality that is ancestral in the family going back generations. Heaney himself, however, is detached from this tradition. He does not work with a spade but with a pen. Nevertheless, he feels the imperative to continue in the same ancient tradition: he must dig with his pen. He can no longer participate in the tradition of his family, of his place, but must— not can, but must—instead keep the tradition alive through writing it. It is in this sense that

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Heaney is the follower of his father, even as he goes on where his father cannot follow. In ‘‘Follower’’ Heaney proclaims himself the follower of tradition, but is nevertheless forced to move away from a tradition that cannot follow him into the modern world.

THE SPEAKER IN ‘FOLLOWER’ CLEARLY PROVIDES THE CONSTATIVES OF THE POEM’S

Source: Bradley A. Skeen, Critical Essay on ‘‘Follower,’’ in Poetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2009.

FICTIONAL ‘INFORMATION.’ AT THE SAME TIME, HE

John Boly

OF WHICH PLAYS OUT A DRAMA IN BRIEF.’’

ALSO ENACTS A SERIES OF PERFORMATIVES, EACH

In the following excerpt, Boly discusses the speaker, eulogy, and poetic melancholy in Heaney’s ‘‘Follower.’’ Readers of Seamus Heaney’s poetry may remember the scene in ‘‘Follower’’ when the father, hard at work with spring ploughing, interrupts his task to reach down, pick up his little boy, and set him on his shoulders. It is an intimate detail made poignant by the speaker’s point of view; now an adult, he recollects a moment in childhood shared with a father who has passed away. Composed altogether of nine such scenes, the poem serves as a funerary monument. The father and horse plough appear first, much as would the central figure of a classical frieze, and then supporting scenes encircle them: the father adjusting the coulter, pivoting the team, striding about the farm with his son following. As would be expected from the shallow depths of a bas-relief, there is no background. Though set in the bloom of an Irish spring, the poem makes no mention of wildflowers, birdsongs, the rich odors of wet steel, freshly turned earth, and weathered tack. Instead, a sculptural austerity prevails. A few clicks of the ploughman’s tongue and the massive draft surge against the traces. The thick clay, doubtlessly sodden from winter rains, curls with an effortless grace. As if to defy the mystery of death, a raking light captures each detail so it is possible to feel the ploughman’s eye squint as he lines up his next pass, or his son’s slender arm stiffen as he dreams of one day driving the team himself. The scene provides an ideal opportunity for poetic melancholy. The child, grown up, discovers like the creator of another cold pastoral that he may never enter the world of his beholding. Yet the tone of ‘‘Follower’’’s initial persona suggests something different from longing or regret: relief, maybe even accomplishment. Homages to the dead can also serve the interests of the living, and it is not unusual for such reminiscences to become a means of containment. As Rene Girard notes in Violence and the Sacred,

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‘‘With death a contagious sort of violence is let loose on the community, and the living must take steps to protect themselves against it. So they quarantine death . . . ’’ (255). The cliche about speaking no ill of the dead may present itself as an act of reverence for the deceased, but it also protects the living. The wellgroomed anecdotes and recollections found in funereal genres help to edit painful memories and displace ugly secrets. It might even be possible to construct a correlative index. The more intense an effort to enshrine the dead (to seal, fix, finish them), the greater their threat. If so, the danger in ‘‘Follower’’ would be considerable because the initial persona resorts to one of the most powerful of mythemes to contain his father. The illud tempus, or ‘‘those times,’’ commemorates the timeless moment when creation moved in perfect harmony with the gods. After the war between heaven and earth, historical beings were forever barred from revisiting this condition, except in the symbolism of sacred ritual (Eliade 80). It is to this forbidden place that the son transports his father, to become one of the ancient giants who towers over the mortals of subsequent ages. This mythical parent acquires the might of a Titan whom creatures, wind, and the earth itself obey. The events of his life unfold with the solemn inevitability of a sacred rite. There is no mention of his thoughts, for all is arranged in accordance with the eternal rhythms of nature. Such mastery cannot exist within human experience, and that is the point. The father, securely entombed in a timeless selfsufficiency, will never climb down from his stone monument. Or at least that would be the case were it not for the poem’s last lines. As with many of the poems in Death of a Naturalist, ‘‘Follower’’ does

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not end; it interrupts itself with the beginning of a completely different poem. But today It is my father who keeps stumbling Behind me, and will not go away. A new world emerges. Sudden shadows overtake the scene and a hitherto idealized being turns demonic. The lurching father suggests a voodoo zombi dug up by some malevolent Pedro Ioa and set to work in the plantations of Haiti. With no will of his own, the heroic ploughman loses control of his own limbs. There is no hint of what conjures this apparition from the father’s sculptural repose, nor any indication of its subsequent actions. Unless, that is, this bare plot fragment is itself an act of conjuring in that it opens the way to so many counterplots. Does the father wish to accuse, judge, punish, forgive, or thank the son. The silent, grim, and reeling shadow offers no answers. For whatever reason, ‘‘Follower’’ ends with the dead awakened from the spell of illud tempus and returning to a ‘‘now’’ forever poised at the threshold of human time. What unspoken summons leads to this unconcluding interruption? Although the poem probably has but one speaker, this dramatic character in turn comprises at least two different personas. Poetic speakers readily play distinct roles within the same work, even when the poem is a monologue. In ‘‘Follower,’’ however, the text withholds the information needed to understand the inner conflict that generates the speaker’s separate roles. The last persona might be heard as assigning blame with an insistent ‘‘It is my father who keeps stumbling / Behind me, and will not go away.’’ But an imaginative reader could also hear the lines in a way that indicates surprise, resignation, terror, guilt, or even satisfaction. A reader is put in the situation of an outsider unexpectedly caught up in a family feud, perhaps recruited by the warring parties but given no explanation of their conflict. One interpretive move would be to rely on social convention. Suppose the second persona begrudges the harmless compliments paid by the first? What would be so wrong with glossing over memories from childhood? Did the horses lag at field’s end, or the ploughshare veer to one side, or the father sometimes need to rest? Assuming that the first persona’s remarks were sanitized, would that be so terrible in a reminiscence of the dead, particularly of one’s father? If called upon, social

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convention delivers its usual swift judgment, in this instance by pronouncing the second persona to be irrational, horrid, distracted, or deeply troubled, with the choice depending on a preference for normalization, projection, displacement, or denial. But few responses are more suspect than the reflexes of social convention, however gratifying it may be to join in communal outrage. If there are no direct connections between the speaker’s beautiful memories and his puzzling self-interruption, and if a moralizing judgment is not the answer, then readers must turn to other resources. Some concepts from speech act theory may be useful here in that they distinguish otherwise simultaneous aspects of a locution. In How to Do Things with Words, John Austin quickly moves beyond an initial distinction between constatives (which assert something to be true or false about a state of affairs) and performatives (which accomplish social actions such as reassuring, misleading, belittling, inspiring, etc.) Yet his earlier formation still has considerable value for critical practice. The speaker in ‘‘Follower’’ clearly provides the constatives of the poem’s fictional ‘‘information.’’ At the same time, he also enacts a series of performatives, each of which plays out a drama in brief. While his constatives are restricted, his performatives are not. There is only so much information available in the poem. But how many different performatives are there? In the last lines of ‘‘Follower’’ for example, does the persona lament that he did not become a farmer, unearth a repressed experience, interject a screen memory that actually conceals something else, wreck a belated revenge on a tyrannical parent, shrewdly enlist one of numerous possible tactics for eliciting his listeners’ sympathy, etc.? With face-toface communications, human beings commonly identify performatives on the basis of contextual cues. ‘‘I will see you’’ might be a promise to someone in love with the speaker, a deliverance to someone caught in a tedious conversation, or a threat to someone who owes the speaker money. Notwithstanding the confidence many people have in their judgment, the process of identifying performatives is notoriously perilous. In the case of imaginative literature, matters are even worse. Literary works oblige readers to identify performatives mainly on the basis of internal cues, yet they deliberately omit, ambiguate, and overload such markers. To tell if an acquaintance were evening scores with a lessthan-perfect parent, a listener might refer to

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factors such as the speaker’s intonation, the nature of the occasion, their prior encounters, the genre (letter, casual remark, retort), etc. But if the only access to a speaker’s performatives is through a compressed and richly metaphorical text, then the performatives’ potential meanings quickly outpace calculation. Necessarily, to interpret the purely textual and thus unrestricted performatives of a literary text requires a departure from the conventions of understanding ordinary speech acts. A literary text asks its readers to consider whether its performatives include some that are unintended by a speaker, or even at odds with one another. Nor is this a strictly modern preoccupation. Shakespeare’s plays offer a great many scenes in which characters sincerely believe in their benign constatives, yet enact bloodthirsty and cynical betrayals. And they virtually consist of utterances whose leading metaphors portray the cast and setting of a coherent action, yet at the same time bear within themselves a medley of divergent and even contradictory dramas. Literary criticism has much to learn about the various elements that cue a performative, or the complex interactions that may occur among multiple performatives. One matter, though, is clear. Some performative cues are relatively apparent in that they consist of familiar generic and stylistic elements. Other cues, however, may consist of more subtle markers: a gap in narrative continuity, a shift in physical perspective, a slight discrepancy within a metaphor’s source domain. As with Austin’s other distinctions, the various performatives of a literary text cannot be neatly divided into so many discrete textual segments, for they are simultaneous. A passage within a work of fiction, or lines within a poem, may contain an array of performative cues. And each of these may bring into being the cast and conflict of a different social world. As a heuristic, however, the performatives of any given passage may be roughly divided between a primary set signaled by familiar and apparent markers, and a secondary set signaled by less commonly noted and thus less conspicuous markers. Adapting a term from Foucault, the performatives of these secondary markers can be considered as heterotopias. In his essay ‘‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,’’ Foucault describes a heterotopia as a space that potentially connects to any other space, yet whose internal relationships ‘‘halt, suspend, or invert’’ conventional relationships (350). As well

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as its main drama, then, a literary work’s performatives may further enact a series of heterotopias or spaces of decoding. By patiently tracing these spaces of the other, it becomes possible to delve into the tacit history of a locution, even should that history be entombed within a protective funerary art. The framing drama of ‘‘Follower’’ suggests an amiable scene, perhaps a pub or other informal gathering. The conversation has perhaps turned to a harmless rivalry. Whose family and kin were closest to the land? The audience is probably a small group rather than an individual, for grandiloquence such as ‘‘His shoulders globed like a full sail strung . . . ’’ would be too great a risk with just one person. Its members do not know the speaker well, otherwise they would not need to be told he is talking about his own father. Most likely the audience consists of outsiders unfamiliar with the husbandry skills that were common prior to the use of farm tractors. Were they locals they would be unimpressed by the initial flourish of rural argot: ‘‘shafts,’’ ‘‘wing,’’ ‘‘sock,’’ ‘‘headrig.’’ Interestingly, the speaker draws on this lexicon for only the first two quatrains. Each term occurs once, after which he returns to a more standard diction. His brief and well-placed display of verbal expertise leaves the impression of someone, perhaps an outsider himself, who mimics a ploughman’s language just long enough to assume the role. Whatever his intentions, the initial persona plays several tramps in this conversational game. His ancestors belong to a tradition of survival that reaches back to fifth-century BC tillers of millet, and his diction confers an expert’s knowledge and authority. Put simply, he pulls rank. In different circumstances, even casual companions would grow suspicious and maybe resentful. But ‘‘Follower’’ also conducts a ceremony for honoring the dead, a eulogy, which tightly restricts an audience’s responses. Anyone within earshot of a eulogy is supposed to listen respectfully. Doing so is a social obligation because the dead, if not put to rest, may wreak havoc anywhere. Those in attendance must furthermore take the speaker at his word, lest irony or innuendo begin to unravel the pall of reverence. Eulogies are usually announced well in advance so that participants can arrive well prepared to play their attentive and supportive roles. Yet ‘‘Follower’’’s band of mourners find themselves inducted without benefit of either

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prior notice or situational cues, so they could not possibly anticipate the consequences of the subtle net in which they are caught. Only a gradual accumulation of past tenses hints that the father has passed away, and even this remains an inference, not a fact. The eulogy’s restrictions of the audience insinuate rather than announce themselves. Perhaps the father is still alive, but who would dare ask? By the time the listeners understand the drama in which they have been cast, it is too late. They have no choice but to play their assigned role. But what about the restrictions on the speaker? Some generic codes are relevant here. A eulogy is not an encomium, which requires emotional warmth from the speaker; or a panegyric, which requires richly elaborated praise; or a tribute, which requires both profound grief and a substantial memorial, preferably one that involves heavy expense. Eulogies instead tend to be set pieces, delivered by commissioned rhetors, who do not know the deceased well, if at all. In a busy world, a eulogy offers a ready-made and convenient template, complete with fill-in blanks. All the initial persona of ‘‘Follower’’ need do is follow the numbers. 1. Put the deceased at center stage, but describe general features common to a role rather than specific details about an individual. Anyone working a horse-drawn plough must adjust the share depth and angle of the moldboard according to the soil conditions, keep a solid grip on the lurching handles, turn the team at field’s end, and match the furrows so as to waste neither time nor tillage. These are also the major events of the poem. 2. Keep it safe and shallow. The two-dimensional ploughman appears entirely from the outside, just like his draft horses. The audience learns nothing of the father’s thoughts, dreams, or disappointments, not even those that would be risk-free truisms such as his great love of the land or deep concern for his family. 3. To heighten the reality effect, and keep disharmonious memories at bay, weave several different occasions into a single memorable episode. The eulogy forsakes the splays and tangles of historical time for the fight inevitability of a plot. It creates an unbroken thread, but at a high cost of exclusion.

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4. End with a contrast between the ennobled past and the dismal future. There can be no doubt concerning the difference between the father’s manly prowess and the son’s childish mimicry. I wanted to grow up and plough, To close one eye, stiffen my arm. All I ever did was follow In his broad shadow round the farm. I was a nuisance, tripping, falling, Yapping always. While such dogged adherence to generic convention would make sense for a professional, especially one who is rushed or underpaid, for a son it raises questions about the purpose of his performative. Is its primary objective to conduct an act of homage to the dead? Or is this only a tactical means to another end, namely to exercise inescapable power over a conscript and submissive audience? It is a curious issue to raise, were it not for the even more curious absence of either emotion or understanding of son for father . . . . Source: John Boly, ‘‘Following Seamus Heaney’s ‘Follower’: Toward a Performative Criticism,’’ in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 46, No. 3, Fall 2000, p. 269.

Elmer Andrews In the following excerpt, Andrews explores the opposition of masculine and feminine elements in Heaney’s poems, including ‘‘Follower.’’ . . . Everywhere in his writings Heaney is acutely sensitive to the opposition between masculine will and intelligence on the one hand, and, on the other, feminine instinct and emotion; between architectonic masculinity and natural female feeling for mystery and divination. It is the opposition between the arena of public affairs and the intimate, secret stations of ‘‘the realms of whisper.’’ He uses it to describe the tension between English influence and Irish experience (‘‘The feminine element for me involves the matter of Ireland and the masculine strain is drawn from involvement with English literature ’’[Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978, 132]). It underlies two different responses to landscape, one that is ‘‘lived, illiterate and unconscious,’’ and one that is ‘‘learned, literate and conscious’’ (P, p. 131). Early poems like ‘‘Digging’’ and ‘‘Follower’’ establish his troubling self-consciousness about the relationship between ‘‘roots and reading,’’ the lived and the learned.

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survive a still-birth’’ (P, p. 49). Poetry is essentially a mystery, a corpse from the bog, a whispering from the dark, a gift from the goddess. The poet is passive receiver before he is an active maker.

EARLY POEMS LIKE ‘DIGGING’ AND ‘FOLLOWER’ ESTABLISH HIS TROUBLING SELFCONSCIOUSNESS ABOUT THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ‘ROOTS AND READING,’ THE LIVED AND THE LEARNED.’’

In attempting to resolve these contrarieties, the example of Patrick Kavanagh was invaluable. Kavanagh, the son of a country shoemaker in Inishkeen, County Monaghan, made the move from his native parish to London in 1937, and then in 1939 to Dublin, where he spent most of the rest of his life. Kavanagh’s career seemed to Heaney to parallel much in his own, especially the conflict between ‘‘the illiterate self that was tied to the little hills and earthed in the stony grey soil and the literate self that pined for ‘the City of Kings / Where art, music and letters were the real things’’’ (P, p. 137). The importance to Heaney of Kavanagh’s ‘‘The Great Hunger’’ lay in the balance achieved between ‘‘intimacy with actual clay’’ (P, p. 122) and ‘‘the penalty of consciousness’’ (P, p. 118), through which Kavanagh proved the poet’s imaginative self-sufficiency within his own parish. Kavanagh’s assertion that ‘‘parochialism is universal, it deals with fundamentals’’ gave Heaney confidence in the poetic validity of his own preoccupation with his County Derry childhood. From Kavanagh’s most successful work he could learn from a poet who had managed to develop ironic points of vantage on his material, which promoted the articulation of more subtle, complex feelings about the relationship between poet and place. The pervasiveness of the masculine/feminine opposition in Heaney’s writings about himself and other poets originates in a deepseated sense of his own divided feelings and experience. His poetry reflects the attempt to reconcile the tension. The poem, Heaney says, should be a ‘‘completely successful love act between the craft and the gift.’’ But it is the gift, the initial incubatory action, he keeps reminding us, which is for him the crucial stage in the creative process. A poem, he believes, can survive stylistic blemishes that are due to inadequate crafting, but ‘‘it cannot

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There are times, however, when Heaney felt guilty or exasperated with this essentially passive role and wanted poetry to do something; when he wished to be a man of action making direct political statements rather than an equivocator, a parablist, a supplicant, or a withdrawn aesthete. From the beginning, from that opening image in the first poem in his first volume, ‘‘Digging,’’ the shadow of a gunman is present, as if to convince us that the pen can be as mighty as the gun. He compensates for his failure to follow men of action by making promises: he’ll dig with his pen he says. The theme does not become prominent until North, where art and the role of the artist come under his tormented scrutiny. By then Ulster was in a state of war. Despite the lapse of confidence in art which North evinces—and the intensity of the anguish it occasioned should not be underestimated, as the last poem in North, ‘‘Exposure,’’ would testify—the great bulk of Heaney’s prose statements, comments to interviewers, and reviews of other writers are made from the point of view of a poet. When he turns to fellow poets, he tends to focus on their use of language, their verbal music, before theme or meaning. He never comments from the point of view of a politically committed spokesman, rarely even from a strictly academic viewpoint. He registers his appreciation of poetry as ‘‘self-delighting buds on the old bough of tradition’’ (P, p. 174). He takes the politically committed artist to task, in this case the Marxist, for attempting ‘‘to sweep the poetic enterprise clean of those somewhat hedonistic impulses towards the satisfactions of aural and formal play out of which poems arise, whether they aspire to delineate or to obfuscate ‘things as they are’’’ (P, p. 174). Typically, Paul Muldoon qualifies as ‘‘one of the very best’’ for ‘‘the opulence of the music, the overspill of creative joy,’’ for his exploitation of ‘‘the language’s potential for generating new meanings out of itself . . . this sense of buoyancy, this delight in the trickery and lechery that words are capable of’’ (P, p. 213). ‘‘During the last few years,’’ Heaney stated in 1975, ‘‘there has been considerable expectation that poets from Northern Ireland should

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‘say’ something about ‘the situation.’’’ Heaney’s comment on this demand was that ‘‘in the end they [poets] will only be worth listening to if they are saying something about and to themselves.’’ Poetry for Heaney is its own special action, has its own mode of reality. In his review of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, who had found it impossible to make an accommodation with Soviet realities under Stalin, Heaney writes: We live here in critical times ourselves, when the idea of poetry as an art is in danger of being overshadowed by a quest for poetry as a diagram of political attitudes. Some commentators have all the fussy literalism of an official from the ministry of truth. (P, p. 219).

What Heaney’s review asserts is the urgent need to fight for the very life of poetry in a world which seems increasingly to discount it. He elevates the artist’s work above the moralist’s. The principle of the autonomy of art frees the artist from tendentiousness, vulgar moralizing, and political propagandizing. A cut below the surface, however, are the whole world’s concerns which, by virtue of the poet’s ‘‘aesthetic distance,’’ can be treated with a kind of passionate detachment, a concerned disinterestedness. Heaney speaks as an apologist of the ‘‘religion of art.’’ The Mandelstam review begins with this impassioned pronouncement: ‘‘Art for Art’s Sake’’ has become a gibe because of an inadequate notion of what art can encompass, and is usually bandied by people who are philistines anyhow. Art has a religious, a binding force, for the artist. Language is the poet’s faith and the faith of his fathers and in order to go his own way and do his proper work in an agnostic time, he has to bring that faith to the point of arrogance and triumphalism. (P, p. 217).

Inevitably, however, politics come into communication with the poetical function, but legitimately only when the political situation has first been emotionally experienced and reduced to subordinate status in an aesthetically created universe of symbols. If Heaney’s poetry automatically encompasses politics, he is careful that it should not serve them. In this respect the Yeatsian aesthetic is exemplary. There is a passage from Yeats’s essay, ‘‘Samhain: 1905,’’ part of which Heaney quotes at the beginning of Preoccupations: One cannot be less than certain that the poet, though it may well be for him to have right opinions, above all if his country be at death’s door, must keep all opinion that he holds to

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merely because he thinks it right, out of poetry, if it is to be poetry at all. At the enquiry which preceded the granting of a patent to the Abbey Theatre I was asked if Cathleen ni Houlihan was not written to affect opinion. Certainly it was not. I had a dream one night which gave me a story, and I had certain emotions about this country, and I gave those emotions expression for my own pleasure. If I had written to convince others I would have asked myself, not ‘‘Is that exactly what I think and feel?’’ but ‘‘How would that strike so-and-so? How will they think and feel when they have read it?’’ And all would be oratorical and insincere. If we understand our own minds, and the things that are striving to utter themselves through our minds, we move others, not because we have understood or thought about those others, but because all life has the same root. Coventry Patmore has said, ‘‘The end of art is peace,’’ and the following of art is little different from the following of religion in the intense preoccupation it demands.

Like Yeats, Heaney writes political poetry; but, also like Yeats, he is not political in any doctrinaire sense. As a man like any other man, politics are part of his life: being a poet does not separate him from the concerns of common humanity. What being a poet means is that his concern cannot simply be with abstract ideas, but with ideas suffused and shaped by emotion, and absorbed at the deepest levels of consciousness. The Yeatsian declaration that poetry is ‘‘expression for my own pleasure’’ is echoed by Joyce’s shade in ‘‘Station Island,’’ when he advises the poet, ‘‘The main thing is to write / for the joy of it.’’ Art and politics may come from different imaginative ‘‘levels’’ of the personality if the art is good, original, deep, authentic enough: if the latter is the case (that is, in the case of good writers) the artistic insight is prophetic, ‘‘true,’’ at a deeper level, and for a longer time, than any political idea can be. In an interview with Seamus Deane, Heaney sought to explain the political nature of his poetry: Poetry is born out of the watermarks and colourings of the self. But that self in some ways takes its spiritual pulse from the inward spiritual structuring of the community to which it belongs; and the community to which I belong is Catholic and Nationalist. I believe that the poet’s force now, and hopefully in the future, is to maintain the efficacy of his own ‘‘mythos,’’ his own cultural and political colourings, rather than to serve any particular momentary strategy that his political leaders, his para-military

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organization or his own liberal self might want him to serve. I think that poetry and politics are, in different ways, an articulation, an ordering, a giving form to inchoate pieties, prejudices, world-views, or whatever. And I think that my own poetry is a kind of slow, obstinate, papish burn, emanating from the ground I was brought up on.

Heaney will not renounce tribal prejudice as the rational humanist would urge, but write out of it in such a way as to clarify his own feelings, not to encourage—or discourage—prejudice in others. That would be propaganda—the didactic achieved at the expense of the poetic. ‘‘We make out of the quarrel with others rhetoric,’’ Yeats has said, ‘‘but out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.’’ Clearly, Yeats, like Heaney, was preoccupied with the opposition between the divided selves of the poet, between the poet as poet and the poet as a human being like other human beings. ‘‘In most poets,’’ writes C. Day Lewis, ‘‘there is an intermittent conflict between the poetic self and the rest of the man; and it is by reconciling the two, not by eliminating the one, that they can reach their full stature.’’ Heaney strives for such a reconciliation—a reconciliation between primitive piety and rational humanism, between illiterate fidelity to origins and a sense of objective reality, between the feminine and the masculine impulses. For Heaney, the ultimate example of this kind of synthesis is Dante. Discussing how the modern poet has used Dante, Heaney shows how Eliot discovered the political Dante, the poet with a ‘‘universal language,’’ the artist as seer and repository of tradition, one who was prepared to submit his intelligence and sensibility to the disciplines of ‘‘philosophia’’ and religious orthodoxy: ‘‘Eliot’s ultimate attraction is to the way Dante could turn values and judgements into poetry, the way the figure of the poet as thinker and teacher merged into the figure of the poet as expresser of a universal myth that could unify the abundance of the inner world and the confusion of the outer.’’ All poets turn to great masters of the past to recreate them in their own image. This was the ‘‘stern and didactic’’ image of Dante that Eliot discovered in the struggle to embrace a religious faith. Mandelstam, on the other hand, in the effort to free himself from the pressures of Stalinist orthodoxy, discovers a different Dante: ‘‘Dante is not perceived as the mouthpiece of an orthodoxy but rather as the apotheosis of free, natural,

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biological process, as a hive of bees, a process of crystallization, a hurry of pigeon flights, a focus for all the impulsive, instinctive, nonutilitarian elements in the creative life.’’ For his own part, Heaney responds to the Dante who ‘‘could place himself in a historical world yet submit that world to scrutiny from a perspective beyond history,’’ who ‘‘could accommodate the political and the transcendent.’’ Dante, says Heaney, is the great model for the poet who ‘‘would explore the typical strains which the consciousness labours under in this country. The main tension is between two often contradictory commands: to be faithful to the collective historical experience and to be true to the recognitions of the emerging self.’’ Heaney’s goal is the achievement of that momentary peace in which all oppositions are reconciled in the selfcontained, transcendent poetic symbol. Source: Elmer Andrews, ‘‘The Gift and the Craft: An Approach to the Poetry of Seamus Heaney,’’ in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 31, No. 4, Winter 1985, pp. 368–79.

SOURCES Andrews, Elmer, ‘‘The Gift and the Craft: An Approach to the Poetry of Seamus Heaney,’’ in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 31, 1985, pp. 368–79. ———, ‘‘The Spirit’s Protest,’’ in Seamus Heaney: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Elmer Andrews, St. Martin’s, 1992, pp. 208–32. Bierce, Ambrose, ‘‘Prattle,’’ in Ambrose Bierce’s Civilians and Soldiers in Context: A Critical Study, by Donald T. Blume, Kent State University Press, 2004, p. vii. Boly, John, ‘‘Following Seamus Heaney’s ‘Follower’: Toward a Performative Criticism,’’ in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 46, No. 3, Fall 2000, pp. 269–84. Flemming, N. C., and Alan O’Day, The Longman Handbook of Modern Irish History since 1800, Pearson/Longman, 2005. Heaney, Seamus, Crediting Poetry: The Nobel Lecture, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1996, pp. 3–54. ———, ‘‘Digging,’’ in Death of a Naturalist, Faber, 1966, pp. 1–2. ———, ‘‘Follower,’’ in Death of a Naturalist, Faber, 1966, pp. 24–25. ———, Opened Ground: Poems 1966–1996, Faber and Faber, 1998. Le Goff, Jacques, The Birth of Europe, Blackwell Publishing, 2005, p. 150.

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Lord, A. B., The Singer of Tales, Harvard University Press, 1960. Moloney, Karen Marguerite, Seamus Heaney and the Emblems of Hope, University of Missouri Press, 2007. Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Vol. 11: Thus Spake Zarathustra, translated by Thomas Common, Macmillan, 1911, pp. 187–93. Niles, John D., Old English Heroic Poems and the Social Life of Texts, Brepols, 2007, pp. 141–199. Peacock, Alan, ‘‘Meditations: Poet as Translator, Poet as Seer,’’ in Seamus Heaney: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Elmer Andrews, St. Martin’s, 1992, pp. 233–55. Sedgwick, Mark, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century, Oxford University Press, 2004. Simmons, James, ‘‘The Trouble with Seamus,’’ in Seamus Heaney: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Elmer Andrews, St. Martin’s, 1992, pp. 39–66.

FURTHER READING Adams, J. R. R., The Printed Word and the Common Man: Popular Culture in Ulster 1700–1900, Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University Belfast, 1987.

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This book provides insight into the particular character of the tradition that stands behind Heaney’s life and work. Benedict, Chantilly Victoria, trans., The Tres riches heures of Jean, Duke of Berry: Muse´e Conde, George Braziller, 1969. Although ‘‘Follower’’ is technically set in the 1940s, its medieval imagery and the traditional backdrop of peasant farming cannot help but evoke the Middle Ages. The Tres riches heures provides beautiful and informative images showing an idealized view (in no way incommensurate with Heaney’s) of peasant life and agriculture in fourteenth-century Western Europe. Merton, Robert K., On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shanean Postscript, Free Press, 1965. Merton give a very precise and scholarly history of the metaphor of pygmies standing on the shoulders of giants, but does so, uniquely for an academic book, in the form of an extended parody. Parker, Michael, Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet, University of Iowa Press, 1993. This is a standard scholarly biography of Heaney. It treats in particular the interaction between his life and work.

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Freeway 280 Lorna Dee Cervantes’s poem ‘‘Freeway 280’’ offers images of survival in an inhospitable environment. Life, in the form of wild plants and all but indestructible fruit trees, refuses to succumb to the concrete and automobile exhaust that looms all around. However, this poem’s inner meaning is what has marked Cervantes as one of the most important Chicana (female Mexican American) poets writing in the United States. Cervantes’s images in this poem reflect the spirit of a young woman who has returned to a special place along a San Jose highway. She grew up in a neighborhood that was destroyed to build this freeway. The neighborhood was a hostile environment for the speaker of this poem, but like the weeds that she finds under the highway, she has refused to succumb to the difficulties that life has thrown her way. As the young woman explores this area that was once her home, the speaker of ‘‘Freeway 280’’ reflects on the changes she has made in her life.

LORNA DEE CERVANTES 1981

‘‘Freeway 280’’ is autobiographical, offering readers a glimpse into the poet’s inner life. The poem was published in Cervantes’s award-winning first collection Emplumada in 1981. Reviewers of this collection hailed Cervantes as a young poet on the rise. The poems of Emplumada have often been referred to as powerful representations of the Hispanic American experience.

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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Born in the Mission District of San Francisco, California, on August 6, 1954, and raised in San Jose, Lorna Dee Cervantes is a central figure in Hispanic poetry circles. Not only is she praised for her poetry, she is considered a pivotal force in the Chicano (Mexican American) literary movement. She has also been active in the feminist and the civil rights movements. Of both Mexican and Native American ancestry, Cervantes is a member of a fifth-generation California family. Her parents, concerned about prejudices against Spanish-speaking citizens in the United States, strictly forbade the use of any language but English in the home as Cervantes was growing up. Cervantes’s poetry often reflects this clash between her ethnic background and the American culture around her. As a way of reflecting her multicultural upbringing, the poet often makes use of both English and Spanish vocabulary in her poems. Cervantes’s parents were separated when she was five. She, along with her brother and mother, then moved to east San Jose to live with her maternal grandmother, who was of Chumash (a central and southern California Native American tribe) ancestry. Here, Cervantes struggled amongst the poverty and crime in her neighborhood. Her mother, Rose, worked as a maid and was often absent from the home. When not at work, her mother gave in to her weakness for alcohol. Because of this, Cervantes turned to her grandmother for love and support. Later, in 1982, Cervantes’s mother was brutally murdered. In the 1970s, as academic as well as popular interest in Hispanic American literature was growing, Cervantes founded a literary journal called Mango. The journal promoted rising Chicano and Chicana writers such as Sandra Cisneros, Gary Soto, and Alberto Rios. A decade later, in 1984, Cervantes received her bachelor’s degree from Califonrnia State University at San Jose. She would go on to study philosophy at the California State University at Santa Cruz. Though she has written poetry since she was a teenager, Cervantes has published only three small collections: the 1981 publication Emplumada (in which ‘‘Freeway 280’’ appears), which was honored with the 1982 American Book Award; From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger (1991); and Drive: The First Quartet: New Poems, 1980–2005 (2006) for which

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she was nominated for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Adding to her status as a poet, in 1995, Cervantes was awarded the Lila WallaceReader’s Digest Foundation Writers Award for outstanding Chicana literature. As of 2008, Cervantes teaches creative writing and is the director of the creative writing program at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She was once married and later raised a daughter as a single mother after her divorce.

POEM TEXT Las casitas near the gray cannery, nestled amid wild abrazos of climbing roses and man-high red geraniums are gone now. The freeway conceals it all beneath a raised scar. But under the fake windsounds of the open lanes, in the abandoned lots below, new grasses sprout, wild mustard remembers, old gardens come back stronger than they were, trees have been left standing in their yards. Albaricoqueros, cerezos, nogales . . . Viejitas come here with paper bags to gather greens. Espinaca, verdolagas, yerbabuena . . . I scramble over the wire fence that would have kept me out. Once, I wanted out, wanted the rigid lanes to take me to a place without sun, without the smell of tomatoes burning on swing shift in the greasy summer air. Maybe it’s here en los campos extran˜os de esta ciudad where I’ll find it, that part of me mown under like a corpse or a loose seed.

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POEM SUMMARY Stanza 1 Cervantes’s poem ‘‘Freeway 280,’’ like the other poems in her collection Emplumada, focuses on the coming-of-age process. Knowing this, readers can imagine a young girl surveying a special section of her old neighborhood, describing what was there when the speaker of this poem was a child as well as what is there now. The speaker describes not only the landscape as she sees it but also the elements and forces of this

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special place that have formed her. The poem is about place as well as the speaker’s personal development. The speaker begins by letting the reader know that the neighborhood is not a place where well-to-do families live. The houses that were once there were small, a fact that the poet conveys by the use of a Spanish word. There also used to be industry nearby, which implies two things. Houses built near industrial areas are usually occupied by people who have little wealth. This particular industry was a cannery, which the speaker describes only with the color gray, like a tin can. It is also possible that the small houses were inhabited by the workers at the cannery. The images that are presented in the first three lines are neither rich nor oppressive in tone. The effect that is created is neutral, similar to the color gray. The one touching element of these lines is the descriptions of the flowers that grew in the yards of these small homes. These flowers, unlike the weeds that have taken their place, required human care. The cultivated plants such as roses and geraniums did not grow in the wild. The presence of the flowers indicates that someone once took the time to feed, to trim, and to water them. This tender visual image might represent the pleasant memories that the speaker had of her childhood. The tone changes, however, in the next two lines. Here the speaker informs readers that all that she has mentioned—the houses, the cannery, the cultivated flowers—are gone now. In their place is a freeway, a mass of concrete that hides the place that once was her neighborhood. What is left of the landscape is buried under the elevated ramps and roadways.

Stanza 2 In the second stanza, the poem’s tone changes again. Despite the freeways and the cars that go whizzing by, creating a manmade sound of wind, life still exists. Though the land beneath the freeway has been deserted, plants have managed to grow. The speaker names the plants and suggests that they still remember when houses were there and people used to work in their gardens. The plants that rise out of the earth in search of the sun, the speaker says, are even stronger than before. Though they are not the roses and geraniums of the cultivated garden, they are the survivors; many

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of them are what people refer to as weeds. Also, there are still trees that continue to bear fruit. There are apricot, cherry, and walnut trees. There are also wild mustard plants, spinach, mint, and purslane (a wild, edible green). Though the fields look abandoned, there are still old women who go there. The women know the worth of this rich source of nutrition, and they collect the food in their bags.

Stanza 3 In the third stanza, the speaker uses the personal pronoun ‘‘I.’’ Now she is no longer just describing the scene, she is entering the poem and taking action. She climbs the wire fence that runs around the field. As she does so, she reveals that she once lived in this place, and she remembers that there was a time in her life when all she wanted to do was leave it. So it seems ironic to her that she is now working her way back in. There was a time when all she wanted was to be on the freeway that now arches over her head. She wanted to go to someplace else. She liked the straight lines of the highway that would take her from one point to another. She longed for the discipline of the tight lanes in which she would be forced to stay. She was tired of the sun and heat, the smells of the cannery, and the depressingly stale air of her neighborhood (or of her life as a teenager). In contrast now, she wonders why she is enjoying her return.

Stanza 4 The speaker answers this question in the fourth and final stanza. She realizes that she is looking for something in what she refers to, in Spanish, as the strange fields of the city. What she is looking for is a missing part of herself. She does not define this missing portion, but she believes it is in that field under the freeway, in that old neighborhood where she once lived. This missing part of her was cut down, maybe just like the houses were knocked down or maybe just as the old cultivated flowers were neglected. That portion of her, the speaker suggests, could be dead and buried. But in the last line of the poem, the speaker confesses that she holds out hope. Maybe that part is not dead. Maybe it is contained inside a seed, a seed that might be planted and renewed.

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THEMES Renewal Throughout Cervantes’s poem ‘‘Freeway 280’’ is the theme of renewal. The first incident is presented in the images of the fruit trees and the wild plants that grow in the abandoned plots of land under the freeway. Though the houses have been knocked down to make way for the construction of the highway, the land remains. There are thousands of cars passing overhead, yet under the mass of concrete there exists a natural garden. The more fragile plants, like the roses, as well as the people who once lived on this land, are long gone, but the more hardy plants have risen out of the soil on their own. Rather than becoming a barren piece of land, a plot consisting only of dirt and trash, the earth has renewed itself, sending up healthy plants. These plants are even stronger than before, the speaker states. The plants are not just weeds. They are edible plants that will nourish the people who eat them. But the plants and the people who gather them are not the only form of renewal in this poem. The speaker of the poem is also renewed. She mentions the fact that at one time all she wanted to do was to run away from this piece of land. Now she has a change of mind. She wants to visit it, and she even climbs a fence to get to it. Once all she wanted to do was to be on the highway, heading in some other direction. Now she has come back to find a part of her that has been missing. She, too, wants to be renewed, like a seed that has waited a long time to sprout.

Coming of Age Cervantes’s collection Emplumada, in which the focus poem was published, is often described as a collection of coming-of-age poems. The term coming of age suggests an attainment of maturity. When this term is applied to literature, the poem or story narrates an aspect of a young person’s life when he or she reaches a point of understanding in their transition from childhood to adulthood. Often the piece of literature focuses on a turning point. In Cervantes’s poem, this turning point is the speaker’s recognition that at one time all she wanted to do was to run away from her childhood. She disliked so much of it, even the way the neighborhood smelled. She wanted to be taken to some place that was totally unlike what her childhood represented to her. However, when she returns to the same place, even though most of her

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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY Go to a vacant lot in your town and draw sketches of the weeds you find. Then either compare your sketches to a book about wild plants or take your drawing to your biology teacher to identify them. Are any of them edible? Are any of them similar to the plants mentioned in this poem? Write short descriptions for each plant and share your findings with your class.  If it is possible, visit a place where you lived when you were a child. Take photographs of the area. Then write a poem about your memories of living there. Show your classmates the pictures and read your poem to them.  After reading Cervantes’s poem, what images come to mind? Using any art medium, create four or more visuals that relate to the poem. Take lines or phrases from the poem to use as titles for the images. Present your work to your class.  Choose a section of a major freeway in your town. Mark it on a map. Then take the map to your local library and ask the reference librarian to help you discover the history of that piece of land. How long has that freeway been there? What was on the land before the freeway was built? Write a report detailing the history of the land you have researched. 

childhood neighborhood has been destroyed, she finds the beauty that remains. Even though her childhood is buried under the concrete pilings and wide expanses of highway, she finds nourishment. Now that she is beyond her childhood years, she finds that she is stronger and more capable of embracing her memories. She is able to mount the obstacles that have been placed between herself and her memories. Those memories, she finally understands, contain the unsprouted seeds of her beginnings. If she abandons those memories, as the neighborhood has been abandoned, she will have lost a part of herself. Thus,

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Freeway through a wire fence (Hitoshi Nishimura / Taxi Japan / Getty Images)

the speaker demonstrates that she has matured beyond the pain of those memories and is ready to reclaim them.

Loss and Discovery One of the overall themes of this poem is that of loss and discovery. On the surface, the houses, the cannery, the people who have lived and worked in this neighborhood are all lost, at least from this particular scene. So, too, are the cultivated flowers. On another level, one might imagine that the relationships among the neighbors are also gone. The noises of children playing in the yards, of people walking to and from work, all the aspects of this deconstructed neighborhood remain only in memory. The speaker suggests that because the neighborhood has been destroyed, so also have some of the memories. The people who once lived there have turned their backs on the place because all that remains is a piece of land hidden under the freeway. However, the speaker demonstrates that there is also the possibility of discovery. From a distance, all that appears to exist in this place is the freeway. Upon closer inspection, though, beyond

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the fences and traffic, is the land on which this neighborhood once thrived. After climbing the fence and walking upon the land, the speaker discovers that not only does the land still exist but that there is also life there. By taking the time to inspect this piece of land, the speaker stirs her memories and becomes intrigued with the possibility of discovering something new about herself.

Survival One of the strongest themes in this poem is that of survival. There is the survival of nature, despite the neglect and a non-supportive environment. The irony in this aspect of survival is that the delicate plants, the roses and the geraniums that need constant human care, do not survive in the new, harsh conditions. These plants have been manipulated through human cultivation and have become dependent on artificial means of nourishment. Humans have to feed and protect them. The plants have been cultivated for their beauty and their aromatic scent and not for their strength. The trees, even though they too have been cultivated, are strong

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enough to survive because they have stronger roots. But the most self-sufficient plants are the wild ones, the ones that most people call weeds. These plants have received no human cultivation. They are strong because they have evolved over the centuries to exist in the harshest conditions. These are the purslane, the mints, and the wild spinach. The other aspect of survival is that of the speaker. There is irony in her story, too. First, as a younger person, she thought that the only way she could survive was to head out on her own, to leave the environment in which she was living. She wanted to use the highway to run away from home. She wanted nothing to do with her home. Then, some years after her neighborhood was demolished, she returns to what is left. She even fights to overcome the barriers (the fences) that have been placed around her own neighborhood. Now that she is older, she realizes that in order to survive, she has to find pieces of herself that she discarded in this neighborhood. These pieces of herself, she is hoping, may be found in the form of seeds. A seed is a symbol of survival in that it holds the potential of growing into a new plant, or in the speaker’s case, nourishing a new or longforgotten aspect of herself.

STYLE

suggest the incongruous existence of living things with manmade, industrial constructions.

Free Verse Free verse is a form of poetry that does not use a strict pattern of meter (rhythm) or rhyme. For the past fifty or so years in American poetry, free verse has become the predominant poetic form. In free verse, the poet establishes his or her own rhythm by ending the lines of each verse according to the emphasis he or she wants to create. The first stanza of Cervantes’s poem, for instance, begins with images that are pleasant to imagine, for the most part. There are small houses that are decorated with roses that hug the outside walls. There are also geraniums that are almost six feet tall. These images make up the first three lines of the poem. Then, at the beginning of the fourth line, the poet changes direction. In three small words, she makes those pleasant opening images disappear. Everything she has previously mentioned is taken away. They no longer exist, she states. The poet has arranged the words in this stanza so that the three words she uses to tell readers that the houses and flowers no longer exist come as a shock, just as the image of the vacant lots where once she used to live might have shocked her the first time she saw them. Another benefit of using a free verse form is that the poem can be read in a conversational tone. There are no rhymes or measured beats during a normal conversation. This is true also for the free verse form.

Imagery An image is a representation of something concrete that the mind has in some way experienced. The image creates a mental picture and may also evoke a sensory response in the reader. In ‘‘Freeway 280,’’ for example, Cervantes mentions roses, which might conjure a visual image of a flower as well as the flower’s scent. She also mentions the wind, which cannot literally be seen. When a poet mentions an apricot or a walnut, as Cervantes does in this poem, a reader might not only see the fruit but also might imagine what the fruit tastes like. Some of the most prominent visual images in this poem are small houses, a cannery nearby, flowers, fruit trees, culinary plants, and of course, the highway. Cervantes uses contrasting images and colors— the red of the geraniums and the green of the grasses, plants, and trees against the gray of the cannery and the wire fence—to

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HISTORICAL CONTEXT Late-Twentieth-Century Latino and African American Literature Inspired by the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the Chicano movement was developed to promote the civil rights of Mexican Americans. It flourished in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The increasing visibility of Mexican Americans in the fabric of American life, as well as the success of the women’s movement of the 1960s and beyond, produced changes in the American literary landscape. Prior to the 1960s, the majority of the literature that was being published and taught in classrooms was written by Caucasian men. In the 1960s and into the 1970s, however, people began to recognize a

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COMPARE & CONTRAST 

1970s: Only a few Hispanic authors, such as poet Octavio Paz and novelist Gabriel Garcı´ a Ma´rquez, are published in the United States, but they are gaining in popularity. Today: Hispanic authors, such as Cervantes, Julia Alvarez, and Sandra Cisneros, are well known, and their works are studied in college courses.



1970s: Mexican American students stage walk-outs to protest prejudice and promote civil rights reform, such as protections and fair wages for farm workers.

need for literature written by a more diverse group of authors that would better reflect the general population of the United States. Publishing companies responded by accepting more poems and stories written by women and minorities. College courses began to spotlight these previously ignored groups. During this period, Chicano literature also entered a new phase. Literature by Mexican Americans became more politicized, speaking to Mexican American readers, urging them to stand up and fight for their rights. The poetry of several female (Chicana) poets spoke directly to Mexican American women, giving them a new way of looking at themselves. An interest in Chicana and other multicultural literature in the 1970s, similar to the interest in feminist and African American works, inspired college-level studies. As a result, publishers began to accept poetry and stories from the viewpoint of men and women of various ethnicities. This in turn encouraged Mexican American poets such as Cervantes to submit their poetry to magazines and publishing houses. Cervantes has stated in an interview with Sonia V. Gonzalez in MELUS that there were several writers who strongly influenced her writing. One of the most significant influences on her

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Today: Mexican American students stage protests demanding immigration reform. 

1970s: Protest campaigns, especially in California, oppose the construction and expansion of freeways through cities because these developments destroy neighborhoods. Today: Protests against building and expanding freeways through neighborhoods continue. Protesters are backed by environmental groups attempting to curb increasing pollution in cities.

work while writing the poems contained in her first collection Emplumada, was the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Cervantes discovered Neruda’s poems when she was fifteen. Her brother had brought home a copy of Neruda’s ‘‘The Heights of Machu Picchu’’ and given it to her. She claims that it was the first poetry she read that spoke to her cultural experience. Most of the other poets she had read prior to Neruda were British and American poets from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Neruda (1904–1973) was an internationally acclaimed writer and the 1971 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. His writing covered a wide range of topics from very sensual love poems to political treatises. He is often referred to as one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century. Neruda’s ‘‘The Heights of Machu Picchu’’ is part of the poet’s tenth book of poems, Canto General, which was published in Mexico in 1950. This collection attempts to present the history of Spanish-speaking Central and South America in poetic form. ‘‘The Heights of Macchu Picchu’’ makes up the second section and contains twelve poems. Neruda was in political exile in Mexico when he wrote these poems Other prominent Hispanic authors of the 1970s and 1980s include Pat Mora, a prolific

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writer who has published poetry for adults and children. Mora’s Chants (1984) and Borders (1986) both won Southwest Books Awards. Another very successful writer is Denise Chavez, whose popular 1986 novel The Last of the Menu Girls received the Puerto del Sol Fiction Award. The first Mexican American to hold the position of chancellor at the University of California at Riverside, Toma´s Rivera was also a prominent poet and author. His most famous book was And the Earth Did Not Part (1971), which was awarded the First Quinto Sol Literary Award. Another first went to Oscar Hijuelos. He was the first Latino to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, given to him for his novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, published in 1989. Cervantes has also mentioned that she was inspired by the works of African American women who became popular during the early 1970s. She includes poet Maya Angelou, whose first work that Cervantes read was I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, published in 1970. Angelou’s collection of poetry Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘Fore I Diiie (1971), was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and Angelou recited her poem ‘‘On the Pulse of Morning’’ at U.S. President Bill Clinton’s 1993 inauguration. Another poet Cervantes would include in that group is Sonia Sanchez. As a teacher, playwright, and poet, Sanchez helped to develop one of the first black studies courses at San Francisco State University. Her first collection of poems, Homecoming was published in 1969. Her most recent collection, Homegirls and Handgrenades (2007), won the National Book Award. One other black female author who influenced Cervantes was Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000). Her famous works include A Street in Bronzeville (1945), her first published collection of poems, which brought her immediate fame. Following this was Annie Allen (1950) and We Real Cool (1966), among other publications.

California Freeway 280 The 280 Interstate highway in California extends between San Jose and San Francisco and is often mentioned as one of the most scenic highways in the world. The roadway is fifty-seven miles long and begins at U.S. 101 in San Jose and ends near the baseball park of the San Francisco Giants. The freeway was built in the 1950s and was named the Junipero Serra Freeway.

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CRITICAL OVERVIEW Cervantes’s Emplumada, the book which contains ‘‘Freeway 280,’’ was the poet’s first published collection. Frances Whyatt reviewed the work for the American Book Review, describing the collection as ‘‘a highly picaresque, imagepacked regional guide, specific to the experiences of a young Chicana/American poet whose work, though rooted in contemporary American poetry, reflects the unique voice of her heritage.’’ Whyatt goes on to describe Cervantes by stating that ‘‘the poet is often childlike, funny and entertaining,’’ in offering her poems, which ‘‘move rhythmically at a moderate pace.’’ Whyatt adds that with the publication of this prize-winning collection, Cervantes became ‘‘a poet to watch.’’ In another review, written shortly after Emplumada was published, MELUS contributor Lynette Seator states that Cervantes’s work is ‘‘poetry that defines a Mexican-American identity.’’ The poems, Seator continued, ‘‘tell the story of Cervantes’ life, her life as it was given to her and as she learned to live it, taking into herself what was good and turning the bad into a comprehension of social context.’’ In the process of writing these poems, Cervantes has ‘‘learned precision, economy and control.’’ Cervantes, Seator writes, ‘‘is aware of herself as a Mexican-American woman who possesses gifts and who knows how to use them.’’ Patricia Wallace, also writing in MELUS, states that in Cervantes’ ‘‘powerful and accomplished first book,’’ the poems ‘‘are often acts of assertion against restrictive social and linguistic structures.’’ Wallace praises Cervantes’s poetic language for its ‘‘energy and power.’’ Wallace adds, ‘‘Her poems provide us with desire’s transforming energy at the same time that they reveal her understanding of intractable circumstances.’’ Nine years after the publication of Cervantes’s first collection, Ada Savin discussed it in an essay published in An Other Tongue: Nation and Ethnicity in the Linguistic Borderlands. In this essay, Savin states that Emplumada remains ‘‘an eloquent literary expression of the Chicanos’ paradigmatic quest for self-definition.’’ Savin continues, ‘‘Thus, it is through her writing in English, interspersed with some reappropriated Spanish—evidence of her painful attachment to two cultures—that she can attempt to convey her people’s genuine experience.’’

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Prefacing her 2007 MELUS interview with Cervantes, Sonia V. Gonzalez states that Emplumada remains ‘‘a fundamental text in Chicana/ Latino studies’’ and describes Cervantes as ‘‘one of the best read and more anthologized Chicana writers.’’

WHAT DO I READ NEXT? 

CRITICISM Joyce Hart Hart is a published author and freelance writer. In this essay, she examines the images and symbolism in ‘‘Freeway 280.’’ Cervantes has created many images in her poem ‘‘Freeway 280.’’ Reading her poem is almost like watching a slide show or thumbing through the pages of an old photograph album. In using the vivid images, the poet invites readers into her poem through their sense of sight. These images are, however, much more than snapshots. By examining the images and reflecting on the effects they produce, readers gain insights into the deeper meaning of the poem. This is how the images are transformed into symbols. In the first stanza, Cervantes begins by offering a pleasant image of a potentially quiet and somewhat typical neighborhood—a cluster of small, probably older houses. The houses could be cottages that once belonged to a small town, and then as time went by a larger city grew up around the neighborhood. The first impression this image offers is that of a cozy, picturesque neighborhood. The small houses are graced with flowers, such as climbing roses that hug the outer walls of the homes. Also softening the edges of the houses are huge geraniums, which are tall and most likely covered in brightly colored blossoms. However, the poet does not linger long on this peaceful image. As soon as the speaker has painted this tranquil image in the reader’s mind, she changes it in two ways. The first portion of the image’s transformation takes place when the speaker mentions a cannery that exists near this neighborhood. This creates a contrast between the brightly flowered homes and this other, industrial part of the town. The cannery is colored in a gray hue, which hints at the negative aspect of this business. Also, whereas the houses surrounded by cultivated flowers suggest family life and pleasant pastimes spent in the garden, the cannery suggests work. Work in a cannery is typically

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Cervantes’s third collection of poetry Drive: The First Quartet: New Poems, 1980–2005 (2006) has received enthusiastic reviews. The poems are autobiographical, drawing on the author’s early life on the streets as well as her adult activities as a political activist. The poems range from the political to the personal.

Helena Maria Viramontes depicts life as a Latina youth in East Los Angeles in her novel Their Dogs Came with Them (2007). The novel is set in the 1960s and 1970s, about the same time that Cervantes was a youth. The female protagonist joins a gang of girls in order to find a safe path through the tough neighborhood that she lives in.  Two books by Sandra Cisneros provide readers with an insider view of growing up Latina in the United States. One is a work of fiction, Woman Hollering Creek: and Other Stories (1991), in which the author offers brief glimpses into the life along the Texas/Mexico border. Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (1983), one of the author’s earlier works, uses poetry and prose to tell the story of a young Latina girl living in Chicago. 



From Indians to Chicanos: The Dynamics of Mexican-American Culture (1997), by James Diego Vigil, was considered a groundbreaking work at the time of its publication. The author, who is an anthropologist and historian, provides the background and the elements that shape contemporary Chicano life. Written in simple, understandable short accounts, the author describes the specific economic, cultural, and psychological forces that shaped the experiences of Mexican American people.

filled with drudgery. Workers often receive poor wages, stand all day in assembly line work stations, and are often bored with the monotony of their jobs. The nearness of the cannery to the neighborhood also indicates that the overall environment around the neighborhood is, more

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HOPE IS SYMBOLIZED BY THE IMAGE OF THE WILD PLANTS THAT NOT ONLY CONTINUE TO GROW BUT HAVE BECOME EVEN STRONGER THAN THEY WERE BEFORE.’’

than likely, not very healthy. If the houses are located near an industrial area, the air is probably more polluted than areas farther away. This signifies that the neighborhood that is described in this poem is probably located in a part of town that is undesirable. Next, the author adds another element to the images of the neighborhood she is describing. The new elements also drastically transform this portion of town from tranquil settings full of family life to something much less inviting. The speaker abruptly informs the reader that the neighborhood she has described no longer exists. It has been wiped out. With this piece of information, the tension in the poem rises. There is no more need to question if the poet meant to create a tranquil neighborhood scene or one that only appears peaceful on the surface. It no longer makes a difference if the cannery is located nearby, polluting the air with its commercial exhaust and dulling the employees’s minds with boredom and low pay. The focus now is on the fact that the neighborhood and the cannery are gone. Now the readers’s attention turns to the question of what happened to them and what has taken their place. Whereas the first stanza began with images that suggest a possibly vibrant life, the stanza ends with no life at all. The final impression of the first stanza is not of family life or of a thriving urban neighborhood but rather of a sense of destruction, abandonment, or even worse. The image in the last line of the first stanza completely negates the images in the beginning of the poem. Where there was life in the beginning, there is only a wound at the end. The quiet, flower-strewn neighborhood is not just gone, it is buried, covered over by concrete roads that remind the speaker of a scar, the puffy, dried skin that forms over a puncture or a scrape on a person’s body after a battle. At the mention of

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a scar, readers might also envision that some kind of battle might have taken place. This symbol of a scar further undermines the sense of tranquility that was present in the beginning of the first stanza. In the second stanza, the same pattern of images exists. In the first stanza, the images changed from tranquility to a kind of barren emptiness. In the second stanza, the images change in reverse order, from the dispiriting to the nourishing. The speaker’s tone, when she creates the image of the freeway in the second stanza, is not positive. First, there are the sounds of the traffic whipping by. This is followed by the image of not just vacant or open lots but lots that have been discarded. There once was life or beauty on these lots, the speaker suggests, but that life no longer exists. The effects of these images might conjure up sadness; life has been taken away from the land that remains behind. The scene has changed but not for the better. Where once the land was picturesque, now it is polluted by huge man-made concrete structures that have all but buried the land that once supported a neighborhood. However, in the remaining lines of the second stanza, the speaker suggests hope. Hope is symbolized by the image of the wild plants that not only continue to grow but have become even stronger than they were before. In contrast, the cultivated roses and geraniums have died off. The people who once pulled the wild plants out by their roots because they were considered weeds in a cultivated garden no longer remain. The field now belongs to the weeds, and they are thriving. The women who come to the abandoned lots are therefore also thriving. They come to pick the so-called weeds because the women know the nutritious qualities of the wild plants. So this stanza develops from the negative image of abandonment and death to the more lively sense of nourishment. In the third stanza, the images the speaker offers are more like a short video than static snapshots. The speaker is climbing over a fence in the first lines of this stanza. She tells readers that she is struggling to get into a place that she has previously tried to escape. At another time in her life, the freeway represented freedom. The road would, she imagined, lead her to a better place. She was tired of the environment in which she lived. She wanted the opposite of the oppressive heat and the odors of her neighborhood.

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Since the speaker was so accustomed to wanting to get away from this area, she is surprised to feel excitement as she sneaks back over the fence that is there to bar her access to the land that once held her. She is conquering an obstacle, but in the opposite direction than the one she remembers from her youth. Instead of running away, she now wants back in. In this stanza, the speaker accomplishes this feat. She is back on the land under the freeway. The fourth and last stanza explains in mixed images why the speaker has fought her way to this point. There is a sense of hope both at the beginning and at the end of the stanza. However, this sense of hope is corrupted. First, the speaker hopes she will find something she has lost here, in this strange city of concrete columns and weeds that was once her home. The something she is looking for is a part of her, the speaker says. Then she provides a negative or dismal image. She fears that this lost part of her has been cut down, possibly destroyed, just as the roses and geraniums were mutilated and the houses were ruined. She also suggests that this part of her that she is looking for might even be dead. But before the poem ends, the speaker returns to her former sense of hope. There is a chance, she suggests, that she will find a seed, something that contains all the knowledge or all the basic elements needed to re-grow that missing part of her. She has hope that she will discover something about herself that has grown stronger and will help nourish her, just like the wild plants that have grown stronger and now nourish the old women who come back to this all-but-forgotten plot of land under the freeway. As the old women claim the purslane, the wild spinach, and the mint and then place them in their bags and carry them home, so too does the speaker want to take the missing part of her home. Source: Joyce Hart, Critical Essay on ‘‘Freeway 280,’’ in Poetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2009.

Patricia Wallace In the following excerpt, Wallace discusses Cervantes’s struggle to present the real, historical world while incorporating literary elements in the poems of Emplumada. When Emerson, in the 1840s, imagined an ideal American poet, he confessed his difficulties even with the models of Milton and Homer; the one he found ‘‘too literary’’ and the other ‘‘too

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IN MANY OF THE POEMS IN EMPLUMADA, CERVANTES’S DESIRE TO ALTER CIRCUMSTANCE THROUGH IMAGINATIVE POWER MEETS WITH WHAT RESISTS THAT DESIRE. HER POEMS PROVIDE US WITH DESIRE’S TRANSFORMING ENERGY AT THE SAME TIME THAT THEY REVEAL HER UNDERSTANDING OF INTRACTABLE CIRCUMSTANCE.’’

literal and historical’’ (Whicher 239). As with other of his pronouncements, Emerson leaves this one suggestively unexplained. I take him to mean that his ideal poet will be equally faithful both to what we call art and to what we call history, and that even in great poets, these fidelities are not easily reconciled. Czeslaw Milosz also drew attention to the poet’s divided loyalties in his Charles Eliot Norton lectures, delivered at Harvard in 1981–82. Milosz defined poetry as a ‘‘passionate pursuit of the Real’’ (56), and then acknowledged, indeed insisted, that the poet’s motives are necessarily mixed. In the act of writing, Milosz said, ‘‘every poet is making a choice between the dictates of poetic language and his fidelity to the real’’ (71). But, he quickly adds, ‘‘those two operations cannot be neatly separated, they are interlocked’’ (71). Adapting Emerson’s terms, I want to explore the way both the literary and the literal make themselves felt in the work of three contemporary poets: Lorna Dee Cervantes, Cathy Song and Rita Dove. Each of these women is a member of a different American minority, and the work of each exhibits the pressures of particular, historical reality, and of the poet’s need to witness what is. All three of these writers experience what Milosz calls the way ‘‘events burdening a whole community are perceived by the poet as touching him in a most personal manner’’ (94–95). Yet the work of these poets is shaped not only by their cultures but also by a passion for language’s possibilities, for the creative and experimental energy of poetry itself. At times this passion can seem to separate them from the very communities of which they are a part;

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the sensuous appeal of poetry may seem irrelevant to those who live amidst more pressing and immediate concerns. The poet’s formal, literary education and her fluency with written language may also separate her from her cultural community. And while beyond the scope of this essay, the important issue of a poet’s fluency in English, when her experience is multicultural and bilingual, further complicates this matter. What, then, would faithfulness both to the power of the literary (with its creative use of language, its love of design, its connectedness to other writing) and to the power of the literal (with its material reality, its resistance to design, its relation to history) mean for poets like Cervantes, Song and Dove? This question must be grappled with in the immediacy of particular poems, where the imaginative transformations of language meet the resistance to transformation that Emerson calls the literal, or history, and that Milosz calls ‘‘the real.’’ . . . It was never in the planning, in the life we thought we’d live together, two fast women living cheek to cheek, still tasting the dog’s breath of boys in our testy new awakening. We were never the way they had it planned. Their wordless tongues we stole and tasted the power that comes of that. We were never what they wanted but we were bold. These lines are the opening of ‘‘For Virginia Chavez,’’ from Lorna Dee Cervantes’s powerful and accomplished first book, Emplumada (1981). In making this poem my starting point, I choose a work explicit about the poet’s double loyalty. ‘‘For Virginia Chavez’’ negotiates the connection and the difference between the poetspeaker, whose access to literature and whose power with words separates her, to some degree, from the Chicana world she grew up in, and the girlhood friend to whom the poem is addressed. As she explores her relation to Virginia Chavez, Cervantes also thinks through the relations between poetic language and direct experience, between the activities of poetry and of ordinary life. She begins ‘‘For Virginia Chavez’’ with the pronoun ‘‘we,’’ asserting the girls’ mutual rebellion against their cultures’ expectations for them.

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The edgy rhythms of the opening lines have an assertive energy that flouts predictable patterns. Rejecting the definitions of others (‘‘we were never’’ the way someone else had it planned), Cervantes seizes the power of description for herself. But this is the act which also separates her from Virginia Chavez. A space widens between the poet’s life, empowered by language, and the friend’s life, embedded in a violent reality. ‘‘We’’ divides into ‘‘you’’ and ‘‘I.’’ There’s an emblem for this division when, in adolescence, the poet reads aloud to her friend ‘‘the poems of Lord Byron, Donne, / the Brownings: all about love, / explaining the words,’’ then recognizes Virginia’s more immediate, and different, form of knowledge (‘‘you knew / all that the kicks in your belly / had to teach you’’). This gap between the literary and the literal appears to widen in one of the poem’s final sections, where Cervantes confronts the brutal consequences of domestic violence in Virginia’s adult life: Even that last morning I saw you with blood in your eyes, blood on your mouth, the blood pushing out of you in purple blossoms. The image of ‘‘purple blossoms’’ calls attention to itself as literary, the kind of image Cervantes might have found in Donne or the Brownings. It could suggest that the poet’s language turns toward art in order to turn away from the event. Doesn’t the image distance and mediate the actuality of male violence against women? Don’t Cervantes’s instincts as a poet, her desire to turn a phrase, here separate her from the life of Virginia Chavez, and from Virginia’s direct, spare language as it appears in a single moment of the poem (‘‘He did this./When I woke, the kids/were gone. They told me/I’d never get them back’’)? This question requires attention to the rhythm and shape of Cervantes’s lines, for it is in these ‘‘literary’’ properties of Cervantes’s poem that the pressure of the literal is both felt and resisted. In the lines quoted above, the image of ‘‘purple blossoms’’ takes its place in a pattern of repeated stress, where stress is a poetic, psychic and physical event. The repetition of the strong, monosyllabic ‘‘blood’’ (each time taking the accent at the end of the line) is a part of this

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stress. The word keeps resurfacing, as if to block out an intact image of the friend’s face; it pushes itself between ‘‘eyes’’ and ‘‘mouth’’ as part of a coercive force the poet both witnesses and experiences. When ‘‘‘blood’’ becomes ‘‘purple blossoms,’’ something alters. The image breaks a pattern (the trochaic unaccented second syllables alter the rhythm that dominates the previous lines) and answers the threat of fragmentation by turning the interruptive and obliterating ‘‘‘blood’’ into discrete and intact ‘‘purple blossoms.’’ The need (and capacity) to break coercive patterns, and to compose anew in a way which restores particularity and wholeness, are central both to the subject and the activity of this poem; this need joins the act of the poet to the life of her friend. For if many of the poems in Emplumada (among them ‘‘Cannery Town in August,’’ to which I will return) demonstrate that the lives of men and women cannot be separated from conditions of race, sex and class, the energy and power of Cervantes’s language also challenge the claim that these conditions are wholly definitive. They are part of what is ‘‘given,’’ part of the order of things, but not the whole story. ‘‘Life asserts itself in spite of the most imposing obstacles set against it from without,’’ Cordelia Candelana has written of Cervantes’s ‘‘Freeway 280’’ (159). Cervantes’s poems are often acts of assertion against restrictive social and linguistic structures (a less precise and distinctive use of language weakens this challenge in her second book, From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger, 1991). In this opening poem of Emplumada, the energy of Cervantes’s language seeks to free, if only momentarily, the existence of Virginia Chavez, and the friendship between the two women, from either social or literary fixity. But the subject of ‘‘For Virginia Chavez’’ is not strictly a creature of figuration; she is a copresence with the poet, and her substantiality is grounded in a world outside the poet’s power. Her life cannot simply be transformed by imagination into the freedom Cervantes desires for her. In the conclusion there’s a tension between the poet’s vision of Virginia (as a double for the poet herself) and the conditions which resist that vision. We feel this tension in the rhythms of the lines, which recall and revise the poem’s beginning, its rebellious energy. Here the rhythm and syntax assert against a weight present in the

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lines, a weight most easily located in the way the verb ‘‘ignorin’’ cannot overcome what follows it; the poet thus admits into the poem what she wants to forget. In her image of the two women walking, their ‘‘arms holding / each other’s waists,’’ Cervantes reaches for unity, for the power of imagination to close the gap between the poet and the friend, between language and experience. But the conclusion of the poem insists on the difficulty of defining these mobile relations in any way which does not encompass both difference and sameness: With our arms holding each others waists, we walked the waking streets back to your empty flat, ignoring the horns and catcalls behind us, ignoring what the years had brought between us: my diploma and the bare bulb that always lit your bookless room. We might also read these lines as a version of the divided yet interdependent relation between the literary and the literal. In The Witness of Poetry, Milosz says, ‘‘Mankind has always been divided by one rule into two species: those who know and do not speak; those who speak and do not know’’ (66). When a poet is a woman, and when her identity is constituted, in part, by minority experience, she transgresses this division, as all good poets must, but in an especially conscious way. She speaks and writes as one who knows (who knows in part how much goes unspoken), and so her poems are entangled in the literary (which gives her the power to speak) and in the literal (which is the source of what she knows). Cervantes is one such poet. ‘‘For Virginia Chavez’’ embodies both the gap between the diploma and the bookless room and the deep connections between the lives of these two women. In many of the poems in Emplumada, Cervantes’s desire to alter circumstance through imaginative power meets with what resists that desire. Her poems provide us with desire’s transforming energy at the same time that they reveal her understanding of intractable circumstance. Such an understanding is present in ‘‘For Virginia Chavez’’ and is also powerfully evident in ‘‘Cannery Town in August.’’ . . . Like many other of Cervantes’s poems, this one takes as its subject lives largely disregarded by literary traditions and by the culture at large.

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Those lives belong to women who work at a California cannery, and Cervantes here seeks to reclaim those lives from the shadows of that disregard. Yet the poem opens in a highly literary way, with one of the oldest of literature’s conventions, personification, followed by an image ‘‘the night bird’’—resonant with literary associations. Personification, Barbara Johnson writes in an essay on Wordsworth, provides us with ‘‘figures of half-aliveness,’’ with ‘‘conventionalized access to the boundary between life and death’’ (97). But the concern in ‘‘Cannery Town in August’’ is with a lived condition of ‘‘half-aliveness,’’ one which eludes conventional literary figures. Thus the sound of the ‘‘night bird,’’ which calls up a tradition of poetic singers, is here not song but a form of ‘‘raving,’’ incoherently connected to the conditions in this poem. Cervantes focuses on ‘‘bodyless / uniforms and spinach specked shoes,’’ those whom circumstance has robbed of animation and turned to ghosts. She sees that these ghosts are, in fact, ‘‘Women / who smell of whiskey and tomatoes / peach-fuzz reddening their lips and eyes,’’ resolutely unghostlike details. Cervantes does not personify the women; they are too separated from the poet’s imaginative power to become wholly literary creations. For this reason the poem can’t hold the women in focus, as it can (and does) sharply evoke the sights and sounds of the cannery. It is the cannery which Cervantes personifies in her opening, as another form of coercive force against which she directs her language. The power and noise of the cannery have drowned out these women’s voices and rendered them all but invisible: I imagine them not speaking, dumbed by the can’s clamor and drop to the trucks that wait, grunting in their headlights below. They spotlight those who walk like a dream, with no one waiting in the shadows to palm them back to the living. If it is the poet’s task to try to ‘‘spotlight,’’ like the truck’s headlights, ‘‘those who walk / like a dream,’’ what she spotlights is the women’s ‘‘half-aliveness.’’ That they are like ghosts, but are not ghosts, that the culture places them on its borders (between Chicana and Anglo, male and female, on the ‘‘swing shift’’ between day and night) is a literary and literal description. Cervantes wants to bring these women back to life,

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but knows that poetry cannot deliver them from deadening experience. To ‘‘palm them back to the living’’ would be a trick of language, a literary sleight-of-hand Cervantes’s fidelity to the real won’t let her perform . . . . Source: Patricia Wallace, ‘‘Divided Loyalites: Literal and Literary in the Poetry of Lorna Dee Cervantes, Cathy Song and Rita Dove,’’ in MELUS, Vol. 18, No. 3, Fall 1993, p. 3.

Frances Whyatt In the following review, Whyatt contends that while some of the poems of Emplumada are overwritten, the volume is an ‘‘admirable first book.’’ Freeways, cactus, factory towns, rattlesnakes, heat, the dusty land of big sky: California and the American Southwest; this is Lorna Dee Cervantes’ personal ‘‘barrio,’’ her community of nature, poverty, animistic gods, eccentric amigos, racism and first love. As such, Emplumada (meaning ‘‘feathered’’ or ‘‘pen’’) is a highly picaresque, image-packed regional guide, specific to the experiences of a young Chicana/ American poet whose work, though rooted in contemporary American poetry, reflects the unique voice of her heritage. Last year’s winner of the Pitt Series, Cervantes’ first book establishes her as a poet to watch; when she’s at her best the poems give off an infectious energy remarkably free from artifice and intellectuality, and yet deceptively intelligent. She writes autobiographically— almost always in the first person—viewing her own life as a journalist might, as a base from which to record nature and events in a particular landscape. In that sense, the poems are extroverted, unlike confessional poetry wherein external images are internalized as a metaphor for the poet’s feelings. What the reader knows about the internal workings of Cervantes’ mind takes a back seat to the images invested in the world surrounding her. Moreover, Emplumada is a remarkably easy book to read. The poems, with few exceptions, move rhythmically at a moderate pace and organize smoothly into three sections, clearly divisible by theme. Also it is difficult not to be ‘‘charmed’’ by the voice of the poet. Cervantes is often childlike, funny and entertaining—no less so within her most serious poems. There is evidence of rage, but never without its sustaining companion, black humor. In the first section, Cervantes establishes her roots in childhood memory, persons and objects

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sparking her imagination, from tender observations in ‘‘Oak Hill Cemetery’’ to murderous assault in a parking lot. From the beginning, she displays a superb ability to catapult the reader into the subject matter of the poem; her starting lines are consistently strong. For instance, in ‘‘Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway,’’ a poem on her grandmother (and, less specifically, on the strong women of her family), Cervantes opens with: ‘‘Across the street—the freeway, / blind worm, wrapping the valley up / from Los Altos to Sal Si Puedes. / . . . Every day at dusk / as Grandma watered geraniums / the shadow of the freeway lengthened.’’ The powerful ‘‘blind worm’’ metaphor at the beginning is typical of Cervantes’ ability and highly effective. There is also a softer, musical side to a few of these first poems, and a forthrightness such as is found in ‘‘Caribou Girl.’’ ‘‘I loved Caribou Girl, / for the woman she promised / to become, for the crows / who spoke and sent her poems . . . ’’ There is such gentleness here, a seductive innocence, full of the delicate allusions of ‘‘lips like shadows’’ and ‘‘curling smoke of cold hair.’’ It is the ultimate paradox of the poem that Cervantes is speaking about a girl who has been branded as an outcast.

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lines ‘‘I believe in revolution / because everywhere the crosses are burning,’’ from ‘‘Poem for the Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, An Intelligent, Well-read Person Could Believe in the War Between Races.’’ Even without the example of the rhetoric, the title alone is absurd given the overriding context of Cervantes’ nature based descriptions. To make such a leap between rhetoric and metaphor in a twenty page section does nothing but lessen the impact of her polemic as well as neutralize the sense of mystery in her lyrical imagistic poems. As the political poems are in themselves skilled, it might appear that Cervantes has misplaced a few seeds from the beginnings of [the] second book. Love poems dominate the last section; a few are breathtaking. ‘‘Before You Go’’ is a spider’s split hair away from perfection: Remember this twist: remember how the charcoal found its way out of your hand, how the lives feel under your power. You were a world gone inside out. When I touched you there was coal on my pillow all night.

Occasionally, Cervantes overwrites, particularly in her longer work. ‘‘Uncle First Rabbit,’’ the first poem in the book, is a good example. The images fade, the energy flags toward the middle, the poem ultimately suffers from lack of oxygen for the story she wishes to tell. There is a tendency to extend certain poems throughout the book; poems that would have done better to remain within the confines of a single page are drawn out to three. But they are the exception, these forced, ambitious efforts. Generally the shorter poems appear naturally illuminated, effortless. And what is most impressive in this first section is Cervantes’ overall restraint, the slightly distanced eye which allows her to render intimate detail without losing the image to confession.

The work here is the most consistent in the book and Cervantes at her best—passionate and yet controlled, the emotions lighting precise images, the poems moving toward resolution (as with the title poem ‘‘Emplumada’’: ‘‘When summer ended / the leaves of snapdragons withered / taking their shrill-colored, mouths with them’’), then culminating in the book’s last lines, ‘‘They find peace in the way they contain the wind / and are gone.’’ There is a maturity surfacing in these final poems, a growth and logical progression from the childlike enthusiasm found earlier in the book to a more reflective calm of knowledge gained. As always, Cervantes’ vision lies within the framework of nature, her uncanny ability to render an axiom on a snapdragon’s withering leaf.

The second section moves from the specific regions of childhood to more generalized poems, descriptive and sometimes abstract evocations of nature. But there is a dichotomy here, the introduction of several political poems which clearly don’t belong alongside the highly imagistic ‘‘Starfish’’ and ‘‘Spiders.’’ Juxtapose ‘‘Lean stuff sways on the boughs / of pitch pine: silver, almost tinsel. / all light gone blue and sprouting / orange oils in a last bouquet’’ (From Cervantes’ mysterious ‘‘Four Portraits of Fire’’) with the

Stylistically, Emplumada bears the earmarkings of ‘‘where-we-have-been,’’ long, vertical freeform stanzas, an occasional too-obvious display of craft, breaking no new ground and appearing to bear out influences of poets such as Levertov in the Sixties and a host of upcoming poets (Atwood, etc.) writing in the Seventies. In all probability, as Cervantes’ work grows she’ll take more of the risks needed to sustain such heady imagery, hopefully with a more inventive format. First books of recent vintage have an

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unfortunate predictability of playing it on the safe side, sticking close to established poets’ styles gleaned through anthologies and workshops. Perhaps the current marketplace conspires to defeat even the best poets’ originality. Occasionally uneven . . . a few poems overwritten . . . Emplumada is still an admirable first book. Source: Frances Whyatt, Review of Emplumada, in American Book Review, Vol. 4, No. 5, July–August 1982, pp. 11–12.

Savin, Ada, ‘‘Bilingualism and Dialogism: Another Reading of Lorna Dee Cervantes’s Poetry,’’ in An Other Tongue: Nation and Ethnicity in the Linguistic Borderlands, edited by Alfred Arteaga, Duke University Press, 1994, pp. 215–23. Seator, Lynette, ‘‘Emplumada: Chicana Rites-of-Passage,’’ in MELUS, Vol. 11, No. 2, Summer 1984, pp. 23–38. Wallace, Patricia, ‘‘Divided Loyalties: Literal and Literary in the Poetry of Lorna Dee Cervantes, Cathy Song and Rita Dove,’’ in MELUS, Vol. 18, No. 3, Fall 1993, pp. 3–19. Whyatt, Frances, Review of Emplumada, in American Book Review, Vol. 4, No. 5, July–August 1982, pp. 11–12.

SOURCES Anderson, Rita, ‘‘Lorna Dee Cervantes,’’ in Voices From the Gap, http://voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/Bios/entries/cervantes_ lorna_dee.html (accessed August 11, 2008). Cervantes, Lorna Dee, ‘‘Freeway 280,’’ in Emplumada, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981, p. 39. Feinstein, Adam, Pablo Neruda: A Passion for Life, Bloomsbury, 2005. Gillespie, Marcia Ann, Rosa Johnson Butler, and Richard A. Long, Maya Angelou: A Glorious Celebration, Doubleday, 2008. Gonzalez, Ray, ‘‘I Trust Only What I Have Built with My Own Hands: An Interview with Lorna Dee Cervantes,’’ in Bloomsbury Review, Vol. 17, No. 5, September–October 1997, pp. 3, 8. Gonzalez, Sonia V., ‘‘Poetry Saved My Life: An Interview with Lorna Dee Cervantes,’’ in MELUS, Vol. 32, No. 1, Spring 2007, pp. 163– 80. ‘‘Gwendolyn Brooks,’’ in Voices from the Gap, http:// voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/Bios/entries/brooks_gwendolyn. html (accessed August 11, 2008). Ikas, Karin, ed., Chicana Ways: Conversations with Ten Chicana Writers, University of Nevada Press, 2001. ‘‘Lorna Dee Cervantes,’’ in Contemporary Poets, 7th ed., St. James Press, 2001. ‘‘Lorna Dee Cervantes,’’ in Contemporary Women Poets, St. James Press, 1998. Mariscal, George, Brown-Eyed Children of the Sun: Lessons from the Chicano Movement, 1965–1975, University of New Mexico Press, 2005. ‘‘Maya Angelou,’’ in Voices from the Gap, http://voices. cla.umn.edu/vg/Bios/entries/angelou_maya.html (accessed August 11, 2008). Monda, Bernadette, ‘‘Interview with Lorna Dee Cervantes,’’ in Third Woman, Vol. 2, No. 1, 1984, pp. 103–107. Mun˜oz, Carlos, Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement, 2nd ed., Verso, 2007. Rosales, Francisco A., Chicano! The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement, Arte Publico Press, 2nd rev. ed., 1997.

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FURTHER READING Gutierrez, David G., Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity, University of California Press, 1995. Professor Gutierrez, who teaches history at the University of California at San Diego, examine the ways that continuous immigration from Mexico has transformed the political, social, and cultural life of the United States, particularly in California and Texas. Rebolledo, Tey Diana, and Eliana S. Rivero, eds., Infinite Divisions: An Anthology of Chicana Literature, University of Arizona Press, 1993. The 178 entries in this anthology provide an overview of literature by Mexican American women dating back to the nineteenth century and up to modern times. Some of the themes include personal identity, relationships within the community, and myths. Among the authors are Pat Mora, Sandra Cisneros, Antonia Quantana Pigno, and Denise Chavez. Ruiz, Vicki L., From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America, Oxford University Press, 1999. Ruiz presents an account of leadership and participation in unions, auxiliaries, and civil rights movements as well as a study of cultural life as seen through the eyes of Mexican American women. The women included in Ruiz’s book are history makers, struggling against the oppression of minorities based on both ethnicity and gender. Stavans, Ilan, and Harold Augenbraum, eds. Growing Up Latino, Mariner Books, 1993. This collection of essays and stories offers autobiographical reflections and fiction by Latino authors. There are twenty-six separate entries, all telling one aspect of what it is like for people from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Dominican Republic, and other countries in Central and South America to assimilate to life in the United States.

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Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning Poet, novelist, and short story writer Alice Walker is one of the most prominent female African American writers of the twentieth century. Her poem ‘‘Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning’’ is one of her most anthologized works. First published in 1975 in the Iowa Review, the poem later became the title piece in Walker’s third collection of poetry, which was published four years later. Notably, ‘‘Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning’’ is the last piece presented in the collection, becoming the final word in a volume that explores what can be termed bad or dysfunctional relationships. The women Walker portrays in the collection (and throughout her work) often find themselves caught between being true to themselves and following their romantic desires, options that Walker often depicts as being mutually exclusive. In ‘‘Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning,’’ the final word given on this subject is, remarkably, forgiveness, a forgiveness that permits redemption both in life and in death. The poem itself is brief, a mere fifty-six words, yet its message is concise, clear, and powerful. It is perhaps for these reasons that ‘‘Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning’’ has remained a touchstone piece in Walker’s oeuvre. Widely available in anthologies and on the Internet, the poem can also be found in a 1984 edition of Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning (still in print) and a 1991 volume of Walker’s collected poems, Her Blue Body

ALICE WALKER 1975

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had been removed, and she proved to be popular among her fellow students.

Alice Walker (AP Images)

Everything We Know: Earthling Poems, 1965– 1990 Complete. Both books are published by Harvest Press.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Alice Malsenior Walker was born on February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia. She was the eighth child of Willie Lee and Minnie Tallulah Walker. Her mother worked as a maid and her father was a sharecropper, a tenant who farmed a portion of the owner’s land in exchange for a percentage of the proceeds from the harvested crop. This was a typical occupation for African Americans in the South at the time, and it was one that perpetuated the poverty and inequality rampant in the region. Notably, Walker’s early experiences as an African American in the Jim Crow (segregated) South heavily influenced her later work. As a child, Walker began writing her own poetry but, when she was eight years old, her brother accidentally shot her with a BB gun. As a result, she was blinded in her right eye. The disfiguring scar tissue caused her to withdraw and become more introverted, and she began to read and write in earnest. By high school, however, Walker’s scars

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After high school, Walker began attending Spelman College (in 1961) on a full scholarship, which was won in part on account of her disability. There, she became involved in the civil rights movement, though she soon transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in 1963. While a student, she traveled to Africa, and when she returned she was pregnant. Walker had an illegal abortion (abortion was not legal in the United States until 1973), and she wrote several poems about her decision to do so, and of the emotions that she experienced during this period. Many of these poems were later included in her first fulllength publication, a 1968 collection of poetry titled Once. Walker graduated from Sarah Lawrence in 1965, moved to Mississippi, and continued to work in the civil rights movement. There, she met Melvyn Leventhal, a civil rights lawyer who was Jewish. The couple moved briefly to New York and married on March 17, 1967. Later that same year, they returned to Mississippi, and they were the first interracial married couple in the state, an honor that earned them death threats from the Ku Klux Klan. Walker and Leventhal had a daughter, Rebecca, in 1969, and they later divorced in 1976. In the early years of her marriage, Walker taught at Jackson State College (from 1968 to 1969) and at Tougaloo College (from 1970 to 1971). In 1970, she published her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, and subsequently taught at Wellesley College and the University of Massachusetts in Boston. In 1973, Walker’s second book of poetry Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems, was published. It was her first major success, and the collection was nominated for a National Book Award. Walker’s first book of short stories, In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women, was also published that same year. In 1974, Walker moved to New York and worked as an editor for Ms. magazine. Her second novel, Meridian, another success, was published in 1976. Following her divorce that same year, Walker moved to California. Walker reached the height of her writing career in the ensuing period, publishing the poetry collection Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning in 1979. (The title poem of the collection was published four years prior in the Iowa Review.) She followed this success with the collection of stories You Can’t Keep a Good

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Woman Down in 1981. In 1982, Walker published her most acclaimed work, the novel The Color Purple, which won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Notably, Walker was the first African American to win the prize in that category. The same year, Walker held a writing post at the University of California in Berkeley, and a professorial post at Brandeis University. Additionally, from 1984 to 1988, Walker cofounded and ran the Wild Tree Press. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Walker continued writing fiction and poetry, though she also made forays into children’s literature, essays, and nonfiction. Some of her best-known works in these genres include her essay collection In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983) and the coauthored nonfiction volume Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women (1993). By 2000, Walker had returned to mainly writing poetry and fiction, such as Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth: New Poems (2003) and Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart: A Novel (2004). Throughout this later period, Walker has lectured around the country and has had several notable romances, including one with singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman. As of 2008, Walker was living in Northern California.

POEM SUMMARY ‘‘Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning’’ is a fifteen-line poem that consists of only fifty-six words. Almost a fifth of the poem is comprised of the title phrase. Additionally, the poem is only two sentences long. The first sentence describes what the speaker has seen, and the second relates what the speaker has subsequently learned.

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or tell him how much he was loved, the speaker’s mother does something else entirely.

Lines 8–15 She instead says the words that become the title of the poem (and, ultimately, of the collection it appeared in). Notably, Walker’s father was actually named Willie Lee. Thus, this is how the first sentence in the poem ends. The second sentence explains what the speaker has learned from this peculiar act. She states that her mother’s words at her father’s deathbed have allowed her to realize that the only way to repair the damage that people do to one another is by forgiving them. The speaker obviously sees her mother’s statement as a declaration of absolution for all of the hard times that no doubt accompany a marriage. By declaring that she will see her husband again, the speaker’s mother references heaven or the afterlife or perhaps the Christian belief in the resurrection of the dead and the day of reckoning. In this sense, the word ‘‘morning’’ is metaphorical, indicating a spiritual awakening rather than a physical one. Yet, the mother’s statement can be seen practically. The next morning she will wake and prepare the body for burial. She will see her husband in their home and the faces of their children. This, however, is not the meaning that the speaker sees; instead, she sees the former. This is demonstrated by the final three lines, in which the speaker indicates that she understands her mother’s declaration of absolution to be one that allows an assurance for her father (and for all who are forgiven) to come back after all is said and done. This concluding observation does seem closest to the Christian belief in resurrection, though it skillfully avoids any overtly religious phrases. Because of this, the possibility of return is not only spiritual but physical and emotional as well.

Lines 1–7 The first line begins with the speaker stating that she is looking at her father, who is dead. With the finality that accompanies death, the speaker’s mother is described as speaking to her dead husband in a congenial and matter-of-fact tone. Much is made of the fact that the speaker’s mother is not crying; nor is she angry or happy. This stress is derived from the noted absence of any strong emotion aside from the courtesy that would be extended even to a stranger. Rather than cry over his body, bid her husband goodbye,

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THEMES Forgiveness The main theme of ‘‘Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning’’ is that of forgiveness. The speaker states that her mother’s words at her father’s deathbed have allowed her to realize that the only way to repair the damage that people do to one another is by forgiving them.

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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY 

Write an autobiographical, confessional, free verse poem in the style of ‘‘Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning’’ and read it aloud to your class. Be sure to discuss how writing your poem added to your understanding of Walker’s poem.

Read one of Walker’s short stories, such as ‘‘Everyday Use,’’ which is included in the 1973 collection Love and Trouble. Then read some of the other poems in Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning. What similarities and differences do you see between Walker’s poetry and her prose? How do the different genres create different effects? Write an essay on your findings.  Do you agree or disagree with the conclusion in ‘‘Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning’’? Are forgiveness and absolution as powerful as the poem claims? What do you think this poem is trying to say about relationships, if anything? In an essay, discuss these topics and be sure to support your argument with quotes from the poem. 



Read the collection Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning. Why do you think Walker chose to conclude the volume with the title poem? Why did she title the volume after it? Present your theories in an oral report.

The speaker obviously sees her mother’s statement as a declaration of absolution for all of the hard times that no doubt accompany a marriage. To the speaker, this is an awe-inspiring act, one that she feels has wider implications for her father’s return. This very Christian concept of forgiveness and redemption is related to the belief that all the people who have ever lived will be resurrected from their graves and judged when the world comes to an end. This may be the ‘‘morning’’ that the speaker’s mother is referring to. In this sense, the word morning is

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metaphorical, indicating a spiritual awakening rather than a physical one. The mother’s forgiveness, in and of itself, is rather Christ-like, given that Christ is a religious symbol for, among other things, forgiveness, absolution, and redemption.

Redemption Redemption, according to Christian belief and to the speaker in ‘‘Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning,’’ is what follows from forgiveness. True forgiveness absolves the one who is forgiven, and they are thus redeemed. It is this redemption that allows the speaker’s father to return. She indicates that she understands her mother’s declaration of absolution to be one that allows an assurance for her father (and for all who are forgiven) to come back after all is said and done. This is the result of redemption. Through redemption, the spirit of the speaker’s father is allowed to return to the family, to be honored as a father and husband and not as a flawed man who hurt his loved ones. The speaker’s mother redeems the father simply by continuing to accept, if not welcome, his presence in their lives, despite the changed nature of that presence.

Death The speaker’s mother has the last word at her husband’s deathbed; therefore, it is easier for her to forgive him. Regardless, the finality of death becomes the closing punctuation on their life together. This is how death is represented in ‘‘Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning.’’ Death is both literally and metaphorically the occurrence that allows the speaker’s mother to bid her husband goodbye and to forgive him. Arguably, it would be difficult to forgive Willie Lee while he was still alive, especially given the near certainty that he would do something else that would require forgiveness. Thus, the finality of death allows for the lasting authority of the forgiveness that is subsequently granted.

Acceptance Acceptance is related to forgiveness in that one must fully accept the past and what has happened (without anger, sadness, fear, or any other such emotion) in order to truly forgive. Additionally the title of the poem, the essential statement that is made to Willie Lee’s corpse, is one of supreme acceptance. The disconcertingly matter-of-fact tone of this statement is highly stressed in the poem. The speaker’s mother is described as talking to her dead husband in a congenial manner.

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Myrlie Evers and her children at the funeral of civil rights leader Medgar Evers (Ó Bettmann / Corbis)

Much is made of the fact that the speaker’s mother is not crying; nor is she angry or happy. This stress is derived from the noted absence of any strong emotion. Thus, this lack of strong emotion indicates acceptance, not only of Willie Lee’s death, but also of his life. In another reading, one could argue that the opposite is the case, and that the title statement is an act of supreme denial. Rather than bid her dead husband goodbye, the speaker’s mother says she will see him tomorrow. This statement, when interpreted literally, would seem to indicate that the mother does not register the death of her husband. Nevertheless, the speaker’s observations following her mother’s farewell to her husband do not support this second interpretation.

according to their stressed and unstressed syllables, often in defined patterns. ‘‘Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning’’ is written in free verse. Other attributes typical to poems written in free verse are that they do not rhyme (or do so in irregular patterns), have erratic line breaks, and are written in colloquial, or everyday, language. All of these characteristics are also found in ‘‘Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning.’’ This style, which is actually a calculated lack of style, is typical of the time period in which the poem was written. Free verse was extremely popular with American poets throughout the middle period of the twentieth century.

Enjambment STYLE Free Verse The term free verse is a catchall phrase for poetry that is not written in any sort of metrical form, which is the mindful arrangement of words

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Enjambment defines the way in which lines of poetry end and begin. The arrangement of the line breaks affects the way the poem is read, both silently and aloud. This is because the line breaks make the eye pause as it scans the page. This minute pause, although barely discernible, affects the poem’s rhythm. In some cases, this pause can also affect the meaning of a poem. For

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instance an example of such an occurrence is ‘‘I ran over the cat / with my hands / petting him until he purred.’’ At the first line, the reader would reasonably expect the phrase ‘‘I ran over my cat’’ to mean that the cat had been hit by a car. However, the subsequent two lines make it clear that this is not the case. If the line had read ‘‘I ran over the cat with my hands,’’ this misunderstanding would not occur. In this manner enjambment allows poems to contain dual, even opposing meanings, thus evoking varying reactions and emotions in the reader over the course of a single poem. In ‘‘Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning,’’ this stylistic device is used to similar effect between lines 1 and 2, in which it is not clear whether the speaker’s father is dead or not. The same effect occurs between lines 7 and 8, in which the title statement is made. Based on the line break, the speaker’s mother could very well be about to tell her husband ‘‘I’ll see you in hell’’ (a common enough saying that readers could reasonably expect it). Instead, the mother says something else entirely. The rhythm of the entire poem is also dictated by its enjambment. Its fitful stops and starts, especially at the end, give it a breathless feeling, yet they also give ‘‘Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning’’ an authority of declaration or proclamation.

Autobiographical Poetry ‘‘Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning’’ is an autobiographical poem. In the case of this poem, the autobiographical nature is exceedingly obvious. Walker’s father was indeed named Willie Lee, and the speaker in the poem gives her father the same name. Notably, Willie Lee died in 1973, and Walker’s poem was first published two years later. The effect of autobiographical poetry is that it is more intimate and personal than other types of poetry. This tone makes the reader feel as if he or she is being spoken to directly, and it also lends an additional aura of truth and honesty to the poem. As an autobiographical poem, ‘‘Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning’’ is a legacy left by the heyday of confessional poetry, a style that was immensely popular in the 1950s and 1960s. This poem, however, has much more emotional control and avoids any overly shocking content, two common hallmarks of confessional poems.

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HISTORICAL CONTEXT Feminism Though Walker did not necessarily agree with critics who called her a feminist writer, no discussion of Walker’s work is complete without examining this topic. Though ‘‘Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning’’ is not obviously feminist in tone, it portrays a strong woman who teaches her daughter the value of forgiveness. In general, historians have identified three distinct waves of the feminist movement. The first wave (i.e., fist-wave feminism) can be traced to the suffrage movement in the late nineteenth century. The term suffrage refers to women’s right to vote, a right that was not granted in the United States until 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified. The second wave of feminism largely took place from the 1960 to the 1980s, the height of Walker’s writing career. This wave sought to establish equality in all realms of women’s lives—the household, the workplace, and society in general. It is no coincidence that this wave of feminism coincided with the sexual revolution, as women’s sexual rights and desires were explored amidst the growing acknowledgment of their equality as human beings. One of the greatest gains made by this movement was in securing equal access to education for women, including an end to public funding for single-sex schools. Though the political and cultural inequalities that second-wave feminism sought to address have not yet been fully eradicated, third-wave feminism emerged in the late 1980s as a means of furthering these ends and of addressing perceived problems in the second wave. Feminists at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century argue that earlier modes of feminism focused on middle-class Caucasian women, overlooking the struggles of women outside of this demographic.

Alice Walker and the Civil Rights Movement Walker’s early experiences as an African American in the Jim Crow (segregated) South heavily influenced her later work. Walker’s parents were sharecroppers, and this is the context that lies behind ‘‘Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning.’’ As the daughter of sharecroppers, Walker grew up in the abject poverty and subjugation that African Americans were routinely

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COMPARE & CONTRAST 

1970s: Walker’s work is often called feminist (though Walker does not entirely agree with this label), and supporters of women’s rights at this time are called second-wave feminists. Where first-wave feminists addressed laws affecting women, such as the right to vote, second-wave feminists address less formal occurrences of discrimination, such as wage disparity. Today: Since the rise of third-wave feminism in the 1990s, feminism has not taken any definable form. In the wake of measurable political, social, and cultural progress in women’s rights, the focus of the current movement is largely to attempt to define what it means to be a feminist today and to identify and prioritize the inequities that have yet to be addressed.

unique cultural identity, and some attain positions of power and importance. Today: Though inequality between the races still exists, African Americans, like women, continue to achieve greater approximations of equality. Thus, like feminism, there is no distinct cultural movement that can be ascribed to the black community today. 

1970s: On the heels of the popularity of confessional poetry in the 1950s and 1960s, poetry in the 1970s is often written in the first person and in free verse. Additionally, the poetry of the day emphasizes the emergence of female and African American poetic voices.

1970s: Following the success of the civil rights movement, terms such as black power and black pride emerge. These terms describe the ongoing political and social movement toward equality. African Americans begin to embrace and promote their

Today: Free verse poetry is no longer as popular as it once was, and the leading poetic movement of the day is New Formalism. Poets in this movement promote a return to the formal metric poetry that was popular up to the beginning of the twentieth century.

subjected to in the years leading up to the civil rights movement. Though Walker was quite young during much of the movement (which reached its peak from 1955 to 1968), she was an active participant as a college student. Walker was invited to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s home in 1962 in recognition of her participation, and she was present at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Dr. King gave his famous ‘‘I Have a Dream’’ speech. After graduating from Sarah Lawrence College in 1965, Walker participated in the civil rights movement by moving to Georgia and then to Mississippi, gathering voter registrations doorto-door. This action directly addressed the issue of disenfranchised voters, whose right to vote was invalidated, most of whom were African Americans. Voter registration laws in the southern states

up until this point had been written to make registering to vote a difficult and complicated process. It was during this time that Walker met Melvyn Leventhal, a civil rights lawyer and a Jew. After the couple married in New York, they returned to Mississippi. They were the first interracial married couple to live in the state, an honor that earned them death threats from the Ku Klux Klan. Understanding Walker’s childhood experiences and her participation in so significant a historical movement is critical to understanding the body of her work. Walker’s writing largely portrays strong black women who struggle to retain their dignity in a time that seems to rob them of that very thing. The forgiveness shown in ‘‘Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning’’ is an essential aspect of that dignity.



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CRITICAL OVERVIEW Critical reaction to Walker’s collection Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning has been somewhat mixed. The title poem of the collection is often pointed out by reviewers as a sort of flagship work that sheds insight on Walker’s entire body of writing. As a flagship work, ‘‘Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning’’ defines, clarifies, and distills the overarching themes and concerns that can be found throughout Walker’s oeuvre. Hanna Nowak, writing in Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives, Past and Present, observes that the poem ‘‘appropriately set[s] the tone of the poet’s voice and contain[s] her essential message: a deep concern for all human beings, optimism and affirmation of life, the feeling of continuity, and a highly personal vision.’’ Nowak additionally notes that the collection as a whole ‘‘reveals a tendency towards more public poems. These ‘facing the way’ poems . . . are often directly feminist in tone.’’ Critics do not see ‘‘Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning’’ only as a work that sheds insight on Walker’s writing overall but also as a work that provides insight into Walker’s personal life. This is more than likely due to the poem’s autobiographical nature. For instance, Philip M. Royster, writing in Black American Literature Forum, states that ‘‘the more the persona [in the poem] speaks of forgiveness the less assured the reader feels that Walker’s fundamental attitude towards her father has changed, especially when one considers her fictive portrayal of men.’’ Here, Royster interprets ‘‘Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning’’ by combining both contexts, that of Walker’s oeuvre and of her personal life. Regardless of these critical viewpoints, reviewers unanimously comment on the poem’s central theme of forgiveness. Kay Carmichael even uses the poem as an example in her book Sin and Forgiveness: New Responses in a Changing World. She calls the poem a ‘‘classic statement of human dignity, endurance and acceptance of the hand life has dealt you.’’

CRITICISM Leah Tieger Tieger is a freelance writer and editor. In this essay, she explores Walker’s relationship with her father, particularly as it relates to her poem ‘‘Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning.’’

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WHAT DO I READ NEXT? For further insight into Walker’s role in the civil rights movement, her 1997 collection of essays, Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer’s Activism, is a valuable resource.  No study of Walker is complete without reading her most famous novel, The Color Purple (1982). A modern classic, the story is often studied in American high schools.  To gain a better understanding of feminism and its goals, as well as to understand why Walker’s work was often called feminist, read Feminism in Our Time: The Essential Writings, World War II to the Present (1994). Edited by Miriam Schneir, this collection of essays contains landmark writings by leading twentiethcentury feminist thinkers. 



Though the work of African American writer Zora Neale Hurston is well known today, it was relatively obscure during the mid-twentieth century. In fact, Walker was one of the people responsible for popularizing the author’s work. The novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is Hurston’s best-known work.

Though Alice Walker’s ‘‘Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning’’ is a meditation on forgiveness and its power, its autobiographical content naturally leads the reader to question what, exactly, is being forgiven. This curiosity arises from the strange context of the forgiveness that is granted. Certainly, it seems that grief and sadness would be the primary expressions expected of a widowed woman sitting beside her husband’s body. Deathbed forgiveness is the realm of the priest, of last rites and the dying man’s repentance, none of which are in evidence in the poem. What has transpired between husband and wife that forgiveness, rather than grief, is at the forefront of this deathbed scene? This question is somewhat erroneous. It is important to note that Willie Lee’s wife does

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summarily replaced by a woman who was barely older than Willie Lee’s eldest sister. WALKER’S STRUGGLE TO FORGIVE HER FATHER MAY BE WHY THE SPEAKER OF THE POEM MUST PUT THE WORDS IN HER MOTHER’S MOUTH.’’

not actually forgive him. Instead, she bids her dead husband ‘‘good night,’’ addressing him as she does in the title of the poem. It is the poem’s speaker, Walker, Willie Lee’s daughter, who ascribes this statement with its meaning. In this sense, it is not necessarily Willie Lee’s wife who forgives but his daughter who does so in her mother’s stead. It is this relationship between father and daughter that bears examining. The basic autobiographical facts that inform ‘‘Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning’’ are relatively apparent. Walker’s father was named Willie Lee, and he died in 1973. The poem addressing his death was first published in 1975. In her biography Alice Walker: A Life, Evelyn C. White goes so far as to claim that Walker’s mother, Minnie Tallulah, actually spoke the title phrase over her husband’s casket during his funeral. Yet, the tragedies that befell Willie Lee, and his daughter Alice, inform the poem far more than these dry facts. When Willie Lee was eleven years old, his mother was shot in the chest before his eyes. When Walker was eight years old, she was accidentally shot in the eye with a BB gun. These two events would forever alter Willie Lee’s relationship with the women in his life. As a child, Willie Lee attempted to protect his mother from his father, Henry, an abusive alcoholic who did not love his wife, Kate. Henry kept a steady mistress for several years. Kate, in turn, later did the same. Yet, her feelings of guilt led her to end the affair. Shortly afterwards, while Willie Lee was walking with his mother, her former lover accosted them, begging Kate to resume the affair. When she refused, he shot her in front of her eleven-year-old son. Bleeding in her son’s arms, Kate asked Willie Lee to undo her corset, and the boy was forced to undress his mother in order to do so. Kate died the next day. Two months later, Willie Lee’s father decided to hire a young girl to work as a nanny and cook for the family. Henry was forced by propriety to marry the girl. Thus Willie Lee’s mother was

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The scars from this event became painfully evident when Willie Lee’s daughter Ruth, Walker’s older sister, began to mature into a woman. Willie Lee felt that Ruth was too interested in boys, and he routinely beat her and kept her locked indoors. Beneath this brutal treatment lay Willie Lee’s fear of the repercussions that awaited Ruth’s perceived promiscuity. Walker, naturally, resented her father for his actions toward her sister. Thus, his behavior caused a rift in his relationship with both daughters. Yet, despite his overly protective instincts toward Ruth, Willie Lee simultaneously encouraged his sons to date as many women as possible, promoting the typical double standard that admonishes women for their desires while applauding men for theirs. Additionally, Willie Lee’s sexism was apparent in all aspects of his life; he firmly believed that housework and cooking was women’s work, and he and his sons did not help around the house. This was a typical attitude at the time; yet, the hypocrisy of a man subjugated because of his race, who in turn subjugated others on merit of their gender, was not lost on Walker. She often discussed this fact in various interviews and articles. Black American Literature Forum contributor Philip M. Royster quotes one such article from 1975, published the same year as ‘‘Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning.’’ According to Royster, Walker states, ‘‘I desperately needed my father and brothers to give me male models I could respect, because white men . . . offered man as dominator, as killer, and always as hypocrite. My father failed because he copied the hypocrisy.’’ Aside from the scars of Willie Lee’s traumatic childhood (and their bearing on his role as a father and husband), Walker’s own traumatic childhood experience further changed her relationship with her father. At the age of eight, while playing Cowboys and Indians with her brothers, Walker was accidentally shot in the eye with a BB gun. Fearing their father’s anger, the children delayed telling their parents about the injury. When they finally did so, Walker lied about it, claiming she had walked into a wire that had poked her in the eye. These circumstances, brought about by the fear her father had instilled in her, likely contributed to the permanent loss of sight in Walker’s right eye. Walker’s parents subsequently treated her for the injury at home,

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and she only saw a doctor after she developed an infection and a high fever. The doctor told the family that he could save Walker’s eyesight for two-hundred fifty dollars. Though that seems a small price to pay in the early twenty-first century, the Walker family’s annual income at the time was three-hundred dollars. Walker’s brother Bill borrowed the money, but the doctor cheated them and Walker did not regain her sight. In fact, she was left with a disfiguring scar. Later, when Walker was fourteen, Bill again took on the role of caretaker, paying for an operation to have the scar removed. This incident underscores Walker’s fear of her father, but more importantly, it underscores Willie Lee’s inability to provide adequate care for his daughter. Royster makes much of this fact in his Black American Literature Forum article. He notes that ‘‘Walker, as a child, naturally expected [Willie Lee] to be her protector, her comforter, her inspiration, her rescuer,’’ adding that, ‘‘undoubtedly, one should not expect an eight-year-old, gripped by the physical and psychic trauma of impending blindness, to cope with the imperfection of her father.’’ Yet, as Royster notes, this problem was compounded by Willie Lee’s tenuous position in the Jim Crow South. He claims that ‘‘Walker plays the role of a victim who has become angry and bitter because the person she expects to rescue her is himself a victim (as well as a persecutor).’’ It took Walker several years to understand and forgive her father, and he died before she did so. Royston observes that Walker’s ‘‘hardheartedness towards her father prevented her grieving for him until quite a while after his death.’’ He also quotes a remark Walker made in 1975, when she stated that ‘‘it was not until I became a student of women’s liberation ideology that I could understand and forgive my father.’’ Walker’s struggle to forgive her father may be why the speaker of the poem must put the words in her mother’s mouth. For instance, Thadious Davis, writing in Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives, Past and Present, inadvertently points out this peculiar approach by describing the poem’s ‘‘tone’’ as being evoked by ‘‘the civility of the mother’s voice and the compassion of the daughter’s thought.’’ Certainly, this statement emphasizes the true source of the poem’s act of forgiveness. Consequently, because of this indirect approach, one could infer that Walker was not yet fully able to forgive her father, though

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she may have known that she needed to. Or, at the very least, she knew that Willie Lee deserved forgiving. In ‘‘Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning,’’ Walker does her best to grant that forgiveness, regardless of its source. Despite the mother’s statement, or the daughter’s interpretation of it, the value of the forgiveness that is granted remains the same. It is the sole means through which the damage people do to one another is repaired, and it also opens up the possibility of redemption, through which the spirit of the speaker’s father is honored. Davis notes that the poem thus ‘‘argues resurrection and reunion both in the here and now and in the hereafter where promised renewals and beginnings can occur.’’ Willie Lee’s presence and importance in the lives of his family members (as well as their love for him) are permitted, via this act of forgiveness, to overshadow any past wrongs. Furthermore, they open the door to understanding and empathy; and this, perhaps, is the true purpose of the poem. Source: Leah Tieger, Critical Essay on ‘‘Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning,’’ in Poetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2009.

Evette Porter In the following interview with Porter, Walker discusses the autobiographical nature of her work. On my bookshelf, I have an old dog-eared copy of In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens that over the years has become my favorite Alice Walker book. Actually, the copy belonged to my sister who gave it to my mother. But its history is irrelevant since I now possess the book, and therefore consider it my own. For reasons that are complicated and have mostly to do with my own creative ambition, Our Mothers’ Gardens resonates for me much like Women Who Run With the Wolves does for other feminist writers. It fosters a certain boldness, as well as a measure of comfort and understanding for those who struggle with self-doubt in their writing. The first essay in Our Mothers’ Gardens is entitled ‘‘Saving the Life That Is Your Own: The Importance of Models in the Artist’s Life.’’ I read it some years ago in an effort to find my own voice as a writer. But what was most revealing about the essay is that I never imagined such a supremely confident writer as Alice Walker would ever need a model in her writing. After all, having coined the term womanist, it seemed

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ALWAYS SEEMED SOMETHING OF A SHAMAN—A WANDERLUST SEEKING HIGHER CONSCIOUSNESS, WHICH AT TIMES HAS EARNED HER BOTH RIDICULE AND CELEBRITY.’’

incredible that Walker would look for wisdom in someone else. And yet it is her confidence and her apparent vulnerability that make her such a contradiction. At 59, Alice Walker is one of only a few writers who has enjoyed critical and popular success, albeit not without controversy. Her latest book, a collection of poetry entitled Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth, includes works that are as literal as ‘‘Poem for Aneta Chapman on Her 33rd Birthday’’; to seemingly pedestrian observations such as in ‘‘May 23, 1999’’; to a series of poems that contemplate 9/11 and anticipate an increasingly hawkish climate in the U.S. While not likely to elicit as incendiary a response as some of her other books, Absolute Trust is no less radical in its ideas. ‘‘In the introduction there is a section about Mari’a Sabina, a curandera [a healer] from Oaxaca,’’ says Walker. ‘‘Her foundation in life is exactly that: absolute trust in the goodness of the earth,’’ she says in a voice that’s surprisingly soft. ‘‘Her foundation is actually my own, which is why I chose it. I also have absolute trust in the goodness of the earth. And I think that is my religion, to the extent that I have one,’’ she adds. ‘‘I believe that what the earth produces, what the earth is, is good, and deserves our respect and adoration.’’ It is this decidedly more spiritual philosophy that Walker has expressed in her writing in recent years. And perhaps the best example of that philosophy and Walker’s sometimes unconventionally temporal narrative is her novel The Temple of My Familiar, which the book jacket describes as ‘‘a romance of the last 500,000 years.’’ The book is her favorite, says Walker. ‘‘It is more true to the way I live in the world,’’ she says. ‘‘It is more contemporary to me. Even

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though it covers so much ancient history, it is still more the way that I have lived in the world, which is to be connected to many cultures, and many different kinds of people.’’

THROUGHOUT HER LIFE, WALKER HAS

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Throughout her life, Walker has always seemed something of a shaman—a wanderlust seeking higher consciousness, which at times has earned her both ridicule and celebrity. Though she received recognition early in her career, by and large she has earned somewhat mixed reviews. Critics and readers alike either love her or loathe her; there is no middle ground with Alice Walker. Born in 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia, Alice Malsenior was the youngest of Willie Lee and Minnie Tallulah Grant Walker’s eight children, in a family of sharecroppers. When she was eight, Walker lost her sight in one eye when her older brother accidentally shot her with a BB gun during a game of Cowboys and Indians. It was a scar she bore for years, even after the disfiguring cataract was removed when she was fourteen. When she was in high school, says Walker, her mother gave her three important gifts: a sewing machine that let her make her own clothes; a suitcase, which allowed her to leave home and travel; and a typewriter, which gave her permission to write. After graduating from high school as valedictorian, Walker enrolled at Spelman College in Atlanta in 1961 on a scholarship. Two years later, she transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in New York, to escape Spelman’s ‘‘puritanical’’ atmosphere. It was at Sarah Lawrence that she wrote what would be her first [collection of] published poems, Once. Written during a traumatic period shortly after having had an abortion, Walker’s teacher at Sarah Lawrence, Muriel Rukeyser, herself a poet, gave Alice’s poems to her agent, who in turn showed them to an editor at Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, which published the collection. After graduating from Sarah Lawrence in 1965, Walker received a writing fellowship and was making plans to go to Senegal, when her life took a different turn. Instead of going to West Africa, she flew to Mississippi. ‘‘That summer marked the beginning of a realization that I could never live happily in Africa—or anywhere else—until I could live freely in Mississippi,’’ she wrote. After spending time in Mississippi and Georgia registering black voters, she returned to New York and worked in the city’s welfare

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department. In 1967, she married Mel Leventhal, a white civil rights lawyer and activist who she met while in Mississippi. And in 1969, she gave birth to their daughter, Rebecca. During this time, she continued to write; and in 1970, at age 26, Walker published The Third Life of Grange Copeland, the manuscript of which she completed just days before giving birth. The novel, which chronicles violence and infidelity over several generations of a black family, marked an auspicious fiction debut. Two years later, she published In Love and Trouble, a collection of short stories, and a book of poetry entitled Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems, which was nominated for a National Book Award and won the Lillian Smith Award. In 1976, she published the novel Meridian. ‘‘The first books were written partly as a duty to my ancestors, to my grandparents and my parents and the ones before that,’’ says Walker. ‘‘Meridian doesn’t fall into that,’’ she acknowledges. ‘‘That was more because I was living in Mississippi during the Civil Rights Movement and I wanted to write a novel that looked not just at the politics, but at the heart of the people. And I wanted to see what the relationships were like between men and women as they came up against the fascism, and racism, and Nazism of white supremacy. So since I was a writer and living in the South, it was very natural to write about what was happening,’’ says Walker, who also taught black studies and creative writing at Jackson State University and Tougaloo College from 1968 to 1971. ‘‘The thing about my work is that even when it’s painful, it’s joyful—because I can do it,’’ says Walker. ‘‘I grew up in the South in what most people would consider fairly impoverished circumstances. It wasn’t easy to actually be able to go to college and learn to write, and I did,’’ says Walker. ‘‘I saw a murdered woman when I was thirteen,’’ her tone, sober. ‘‘She had been killed by her husband,’’ she continues, ‘‘and I knew that somehow I had to learn—even as a 13-year-old—I had to learn how to make sense of this. I had to learn to make people see it for what it was—murder. When someone kills you, it is murder,’’ she says adamantly. ‘‘I don’t care if they’re your husband, your boyfriend or whatever. So the pain of writing about that 20 years later, or however long it was, was intense. But so was the joy, because I had looked at her face—which had been pretty

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much blown off—and I had made a promise to myself, and to her, that one day I would make other people see what I saw,’’ says Walker, echoing a theme that runs through much of her writing. In 1978, Alice Walker moved to northern California. Four years later, she published what is probably her most celebrated work, The Color Purple. Though, at the time, unusual in its epistolary form, the precedent for Walker’s character Celie in The Color Purple can be traced to Janie Crawford, Zora Neale Hurston’s heroine in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Hurston, whose life and work Walker began researching in 1970, provides the model in Janie Crawford that Alice Walker chose for herself. She writes in ‘‘Saving the Life That Is Your Own’’: I love the way Janie Crawford left her husbands the one who wanted to change her into a mule and the other who tried to interest her in being a queen. A woman, unless she submits, is neither a mule nor a queen though like a mule she may suffer and like a queen pace the floor. The novel The Color Purple, which takes place from 1900 to the 1940s, tells the story of Celie, a womanchild, who after years of physical and emotional abuse at the hands of her father and later her husband, finds dignity, independence and kinship in her relationships with other black women. Told mostly in a series of letters written by Celie and her sister, Nettie, the novel won the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. ‘‘Even though I wrote The Color Purple here [in California]—I actually lived in New York for a while. I couldn’t really write there, because I was an editor at Ms. magazine and that took a lot of time. I had a child, and I was getting divorced, and all that life—just life, life, life,’’ she explains. At the time, Walker decided to move to San Francisco to write, resuming a relationship with an old friend from her college days at Spelman, Black Scholar editor Robert Allen, who had attended Morehouse. Almost immediately, the two decided to sell their house in San Francisco and move to Mendocino, an area in northern California that reminded Walker of her native Georgia.

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‘‘I wrote The Color Purple as a way of communicating with the spirit of black people and my people—in celebration. So that pretty much completed the cycle,’’ says Walker of her early works. ‘‘I had written In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women—those were mostly black women in the South. And then, You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down—those were women North and South. It was about their spiritual development.’’ But it was The Color Purple that became a best-seller and caused quite a stir—especially among black men. Among critics, Walker’s book was decried for being overly harsh in its depiction of the brutality of its black male characters, while she was chided for being too much a feminist—or womanist, to use Walker’s words. In what was a generally positive review in The New York Times, black literary critic Mel Watkins cited the ‘‘pallid portraits of the males’’ as the novel’s biggest transgression. Others, like poet Sonia Sanchez and Ishmael Reed, were far more biting in their criticism. ‘‘I wrote a complete book called The Same River Twice, which is about the [Color Purple] controversy and my response to it,’’ says Walker. ‘‘I wrote it and published it about ten years after the film The Color Purple.’’ In The Same River Twice, she describes the sometimes vicious attacks surrounding the release of the movie The Color Purple, the rejection of her screenplay adaptation of the novel by Steven Spielberg, her mother’s failing health, her own battle with Lyme disease and the breakup of her relationship with Allen. ‘‘In general, I don’t seem to care very much about what people think about what I’m doing,’’ she says, pausing then, quickly adding, ‘‘if they don’t actually try to physically harm me.’’ For the most part, Walker seems to have quietly ignored her detractors. ‘‘I’m pretty clear about what I’m supposed to be doing here, and I do that,’’ she says, calmly. ‘‘Their job is to criticize, and they do that. So I feel like, it works out. I write and speak, and band with people that I feel need me,’’ she continues. ‘‘I got very involved, after that, in the struggle to end genital mutilation and I wrote Possessing the Secret of Joy. And that was very different from anything I would have written living in Georgia or Mississippi, because we don’t have that there, thank goodness. So it depends, you know. Then, with By the Light of My Father’s Smile, I was very much interested in showing

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how important it is for fathers to bless the sexuality of their daughters. And if they cannot do that, then the daughter cannot bless them by having confidence in them, and letting them be a part of their lives.’’ Her writing sometimes mirrors her own life. In a moving collection of short stories published in 2001, The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart, Walker reveals some of the intimate details of her own life. In a chapter called ‘‘Memoir of a Marriage,’’ she writes: ‘‘Beloved, A few days ago I went to see the little house on R. Street where we were so happy. Before traveling back to Mississippi I had not thought much about it. It seemed so far away, almost another dimension.’’ Further, in the same chapter, she continues, ‘‘I went back with the woman I love now. She had never been South, never been to Mississippi, though her grandparents are buried in one of the towns you used to sue racists in.’’ Like much of Walker’s writing, The Way Forward is elliptical. There is an ambiguity as to whether Walker is writing for the reader, for an intimate, or for herself. ‘‘My job, in a way, is helping people to have that closer look—whether it’s female genital mutilation, or wife battering, or child abuse,’’ she says. ‘‘On the other hand, being able to love wherever you wish and whoever you want, and seeing that as an expression of the freedom that we have. My personal life is just like everybody’s,’’ she admits, ‘‘filled with my friends, community and events that are pretty much mine.’’ With Absolute Trust, Alice Walker returns to the genre where her literary career began. While the poems vary widely in subject, they are strongly influenced by the events of 9/11 and embrace a more ‘‘outsider’’ global perspective. ‘‘I don’t think there is a limit to what people can say about grief,’’ says Walker. ‘‘And I don’t think there’s a limit to what one can say about the need to sit ourselves down and talk about what kind of future we want, if indeed we have one. ‘‘I think all I can say is that now I’m an older person. I’m someone who has had much more experience than in the beginning. But in some ways, I’m concerned about the same issues, the same emotions. I’m concerned with the safety of our people, the planet, people who are in deep trouble around the world,’’ she explains, reflecting on how her poetry has changed over the years. ‘‘I think that with time, we begin to understand a little better that some things we thought

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were horrible, unbearable . . . can be bearable as we get older. For instance, in my earlier poetry . . . I wrote poems about suicide. And now I don’t think about that very much. It’s interesting because I think that to wage continuous war in the world is a kind of suicide. In a sense, the suicide that I see now is a global one. It’s humanity that seems to be interested in ending itself. But I don’t feel interested in ending myself. I think that’s progress.’’ Finally, I ask her why she chose to publish Absolute Trust, since she acknowledges in the preface to the book that in the past two years she had resigned herself not to write anymore. ‘‘Poetry comes when it wants, and it is not dependent on whether you want to write poetry or not,’’ says Walker. ‘‘I was in Mexico a while ago last year and the poems just started to come. I think it was partly because they had been accumulating over a number of years,’’ she says, recalling her first book of poetry. ‘‘That’s why it’s absurd to say I can give this up,’’ she adds. ‘‘Creativity is so powerful that you can’t give it up. It might give you up, but you can’t give it up.’’ Source: Evette Porter, ‘‘Absolute Alice: Feminist-WriterPoet-Activist and Literary High Priestess Alice Walker Returns to Form with a Collection of Poems about War, Falling Bodies, the Ancestors, Trees and Everything Holistic Here on Earth,’’ in Black Issues Book Review, Vol. 5, No. 2, March–April 2003, pp. 34–38.

Adrian T. Oktenberg In the following review, Oktenberg provides an overview of twenty-five years of Walker’s poetry. Alice Walker wrote poems before she ever dreamt of prose, considered herself a poet well after she published her first fiction, and yet (it seems to me) her poetry has not been taken as seriously as her fiction and essays. Is her poetry less good, less important, than her other writing? In Her Blue Body we now have the complete texts of all of Walker’s poetry books to date, together with sixteen new poems. Walker has also provided short introductions for each volume, describing some of the circumstances or context in which each book was written. This is a retrospective as well as a forward-looking collection, and we may now be able to evaluate Walker’s position as a poet in mid-life. Alice Walker came of age in the sixties, and has always written in support of ‘‘the revolution.’’ In one of her essays, she speaks of feeling embarrassed whenever she is introduced as an activist.

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ALICE WALKER IS BOTH A MYSTICAL AND A REVOLUTIONARY POET, AN APPARENT CONTRADICTION IN TERMS BUT ONE THAT SHE EXEMPLIFIES NONETHELESS.’’

Although she has attended her share of meetings and demonstrations, and given speeches—a particularly brilliant one, called ‘‘What Can the White Man Say to the Black Woman?’’ is included in Her Blue Body as a prose poem— Walker’s activism has taken the form of thinking and writing. But the fundamental questions in her work are all about revolution. What it means to those engaged in it; how it is to be achieved humanely against multiple oppressions which are hardly humane; where it is going and what exactly it is aimed to accomplish. That is the more public version of Walker’s concern. The parallel and more private version is how, as an oppressed person herself, Walker can survive oppression, how it can become possible for her (and by extension others like her) to live a full life. These more private concerns are the ones primarily addressed in the poems. For Walker, any fundamental change begins first in the self. In Her Blue Body, she speaks of her ‘‘growing realization [in the Sixties] that the sincerest struggle to change the world must start within.’’ In a sense, Her Blue Body tracks the record of that which is starting within. Because the poems focus on ‘‘Alice Walker’’ herself, used as a kind of laboratory in which possibilities for change are experimented with, charted and tested, they are intensely personal. They read like a journal or notebook which ranges over Walker’s characteristic themes and concerns—instances of racist or sexist oppression, and resistance; the South as crucible, home and garden; Africa as a place of struggle and also as a spiritual source; love and trouble; what she renames the ‘‘silver writes’’ movement, which was the formative event for much of her thinking; suicide poems and poems that celebrate life and explore growth. These themes and concerns are the same ones that appear in Walker’s prose—but in the poems, freed of the

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need to be of service in a narrative or argument, they appear in a much less constrained way. Walker’s poems have a quality of immediacy and accessibility, as if the author happens to be thinking aloud or, in Sappho’s phrase, sharing her thoughts ‘‘face to face as a friend would.’’ I can’t be sure, but I have a sense that for Walker poetry comes before prose; it is the thought in the first instance, the one closest to the spirit, the most inspired. Walker is a writer who is capable of lyrical prose; she is also a genuinely mystical poet. Her language is full of mystical hallmarks—oxymorons, paradoxes, contradictions. Her poetry is about questions, not answers—more specifically, about the process of finding the right questions. A Walker poem starts with the self—sometimes with the body, or an impulse, an observation, an emotion, an inchoate idea—and then plays it out on the page, with all the twists, turns, backtracks, asides and outright contradictions of thought unfolding. For this reason Walker’s poems may first appear unpolished or unsophisticated, perhaps less ‘‘good’’ than those of some other poets. But Walker is not a ‘‘bad’’ poet, just one who has been misunderstood, misplaced, misconceptualized. We are locked into distinguishing art as a weapon, art that serves ‘‘the people’’ or ‘‘the revolution,’’ from art that exists for itself, has a value ‘‘in itself.’’ We find it difficult to include within the rubric of revolutionary art poetry that is mystical. Alice Walker is both a mystical and a revolutionary poet, an apparent contradiction in terms but one that she exemplifies nonetheless. Pick almost any Walker poem—‘‘Revolutionary Petunias’’ ‘‘Facing the Way,’’ ‘‘Stripping Bark from Myself,’’ ‘‘Family Of,’’ ‘‘Remember,’’ ‘‘Expect Nothing,’’ ‘‘Be Nobody’s Darling’’—they are about one or another aspect of revolution but they are also all mystical poems. ‘‘Revolutionary Petunias’’ is a paradox, insisting that flowers and especially the exuberant color purple go on existing in the midst of, in spite of, and even because of, oppression and death. Here is ‘‘The Nature of This Flower Is to Bloom’’: Rebellious. Living. Against the Elemental Crush. A Song of Color Blooming For Deserving Eyes. Blooming Gloriously For its Self.

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Like Walker’s life and work, the poem is built on contradiction. How can a Black woman, sentenced to silence and invisibility, ever expect to write, speak, be heard, seen? I read ‘‘this flower’’ in the title as Walker speaking through clenched teeth. (Does anyone remember Philip Levine’s poem from the sixties about pigs being brought to slaughter? ‘‘Not this pig.’’) Walker’s ‘‘this flower’’ is just as rebellious, insisting on the flower’s (and her own) right to bloom for no other reason but its, or her, self. If every one of us insisted, against the odds, on fully expressing our natures, then we would have revolution; the world would be turned upside down. That’s her parable. Her Blue Body tracks Walker’s self over 25 years of revolutionary struggle: the ‘‘young self, the naive promiscuous self, the ill or self-destructive self, the angry and hurt self,’’ as well as the selves that encompass resistance, change and growth. Speaking of the seventies, a period of ‘‘breakdown and spiritual disarray’’ for herself as for many others, Walker writes: ‘‘My years-long period of lamentation was finally ended when I realized I was capable not only of change, but of forgiveness, and could assume that others were also. For it is change in the self, along with the ability to forgive the self and others, that frees us for the next encounter.’’ ‘‘On Stripping Bark from Myself,’’ in I’ll See You in the Morning, Willie Lee, is one of Walker’s best and most emblematic poems. Here it is in full: Because women are expected to keep silent about their close escapes I will not keep silent and if I am destroyed (naked tree!) someone will please mark the spot where I fall and know I could not live silent in my own lies hearing their ‘‘how nice she is!’’ whose adoration of the retouched image I so despise. No. I am finished with living for what my mother believes for what my brother and father defend for what my lover elevates for what my sister, blushing, denies or rushes to embrace. I find my own small person a standing self against the world

Revolutionary Petunias. (p. 235)

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an equality of wills I finally understand. Besides: My struggle was always against an inner darkness: I carry within myself the only known keys to my death—to unlock life, or close it shut forever. A woman who loves wood grains, the color yellow and the sun, I am happy to fight all outside murderers as I see I must. (pp. 270–271) While stripping bark from a tree can kill it, in stripping herself, discarding the lies shaped by others as well as her own self-deceptions, Walker finds her true, undistorted self. She intimates that the process of healing, which feels like slow death or destruction, is necessary ‘‘to unlock life.’’ This paradoxical process produces a paradoxical result, a ‘‘small . . . self/against the world/ an equality of wills’’ [my italics]. In another poem, ‘‘Having Eaten Two Pillows,’’ she speaks of her ‘‘ambition’’ to be ‘‘just anyone,’’ another contradiction in terms but one that Walker adopts from Bessie Head as ‘‘the correct relationship to other people and to the world.’’ Traditional mystical poetry seeks God, not earthly revolution. But Walker seeks a spiritual revolution fully as much as one that overthrows political and economic institutions. Her poems on Malcolm X, on Christ and others make clear that her revolution would include love and laughter; it would combine ‘‘Justice and Hope’’ [my italics]. Walker has always been a spiritual writer, becoming more so in recent years, until now, when she is perfectly at ease seeking union with the earth and with that long line of spirits that ‘‘stretches all the way back, perhaps, to God; or to Gods.’’ Her spirituality is pagan, African and Native American, in its sources rather than Christian (Walker has always been ambivalent about Christianity, especially the organized kind). In The Temple of My Familiar, her most recent novel, she finds God not only in every human being but also in animals, trees, laughter and breath. Walker’s single best poem, which gives this book its title, is probably ‘‘We Have a Beautiful Mother.’’ Its deep personification of the earth, its ease, make it one of her most spiritual statements: We have a beautiful mother Her hills

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are buffaloes Her buffaloes hills. We have a beautiful mother Her oceans are wombs Her wombs oceans. We have a beautiful mother Her teeth the white stones at the edge of the water the summer grasses her plentiful hair. We have a beautiful mother Her green lap immense her brown embrace eternal Her blue body everything we know (pp. 459–460) Her Blue Body reflects the inner journey of an extraordinary writer over 25 years of struggle. It teaches us, not yet at the end, to cherish and celebrate life. Source: Adrian T. Oktenberg, ‘‘Revolutionary Contradictions,’’ in Women’s Review of Books, Vol. 9, No. 3, December 1991, pp. 24–25.

Philip M. Royster In the following excerpt, Royster analyzes the role of black men in Walker’s writing, her relationship with her father, and her portrayal of his death in her poem ‘‘Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning.’’ THE WRITER AS ALIENATED RESCUER

Walker has committed her efforts to at least two great social movements that have stimulated the alteration of consciousness in the last half of the twentieth century: the Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Liberation Movement. Walker’s involvement with these movements both generates and reflects her intention, first articulated in 1973, to champion as a writer the causes of black people, especially black women:

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AN ONGOING EFFECT OF HER CHILDHOOD ACCIDENT SEEMS TO BE THAT SHE SEES YOUNGER MEN (WHO WOULD BE IN THE AGE RANGE THAT HER FATHER WAS WHEN SHE BECAME ALIENATED FROM HIM AND HER BROTHERS) WITH A JAUNDICED EYE.’’

‘‘I am preoccupied with the spiritual survival, the survival whole, of my people. But beyond that, I am committed to exploring the oppressions, the insanities, the loyalties, and the triumphs of black women’’ (In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens 250). In a 1984 interview, Walker revealed that, since childhood, she has seen herself as a writer who rescues: ‘‘‘I was brought up to try to see what was wrong and right it. Since I am a writer, writing is how I right it’’’ (Bradley 36). Walker’s fiction confronts such issues as racism, intraracism, sexism, neocolonialism, and imperialism in order to transform both society and the individual. She expressed her commitment to change in 1973 with the affirmation: ‘‘I believe in change: change personal, and change in society’’ (Gardens 252). In The Color Purple, she seems to be preoccupied with the task of overcoming black male sexist exploitation of black women. Yet, along with this commitment to change, Walker holds other attitudes that have the potential to frustrate her goals. She indirectly announced one such attitude in Revolutionary Petunias & Other Poems through a persona who articulates the position of an outcast to the social order: ‘‘Be nobody’s darling; / Be an outcast. / Qualified to live / Among your dead’’ (32). The concerns of this fictive persona resound in Walker’s nonfictive voices, but in the nonfiction the speaker expresses a need to be both somebody’s darling (that somebody is usually an older man) and an outcast (who uses her art as a means to rescue victims). The personas in both her fiction and nonfiction also experience feelings of inadequacy as rescuers, and they appear to be both infatuated with and plagued by notions concerning suicide, death, and the dead. (Although Walker seems to consider herself to be a medium, she simultaneously articulates perennial fantasies concerning suicide.)

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Walker’s perception of herself as a writer who is a social outcast apparently began after her brother blinded one of her eyes with a bb gun when she was eight years old: ‘‘I believe . . . that it was from this period—from my solitary, lonely position, the position of an outcast—that I began really to see people and things, really to notice relationships and to learn to be patient enough to care about how they turned out. I no longer felt like the little girl I was. I felt old, and because I felt I was unpleasant to look at, filled with shame. I retreated into solitude, and read stories and began to write poems’’ (Gardens 244– 45). The accident seems to have led Walker to feel both alienated from her environment and perceptive of people and their lives. Her confidence in her insight undoubtedly helped to prepare her for the role of a rescuer, yet the fact that she no longer felt like a little girl engendered attitudes that would ultimately frustrate her goal. Her experiences of the loss of her childhood, the shame of a disfiguring scar, and social inadequacy would soon give rise, in her writing, to voices with tones of resentment, anger, and bitterness, on the one hand, and voices that articulate the desire to feel again like a little girl (or a darling to older men), on the other. The speaker of one of her poems that appears in The American Poetry Review (6.1 [1977]: 28–29) expresses something of the intensity of Walker’s alienation when she asserts: ‘‘I find my own / small person / a standing self / against the world’’ (qtd. in Erickson 86–87). One of the comforts for the outcast persona is her as-yet-unending search for father figures with whom to be a darling . . . . BLACK MEN

Undoubtedly, Walker’s alienation from black men influences her portrayal of them in fiction. Her audiences may achieve greater tolerance of her perceptions of men if they consider Walker’s portrayal of male characters as part of the aftermath of the childhood accident in which she was blinded in one eye after her brother shot her with a bb gun. David Bradley asserts that ‘‘after that accident, she felt her family had failed her, especially her father. She felt he had ceased to favor her, and, as a child, blamed him for the poverty that kept her from receiving adequate medical care. He also, she implies, whipped and imprisoned her sister, who had shown too much interest in boys. . . . In company with her brothers, her father had failed to ‘give me male models I could respect’’’ (34). Walker’s disenchantment

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sounds like that of a child who no longer feels like her father’s darling. She seems to be at odds with her father, her brothers, and her family. Walker is more explicit about her disenchantment in an article first published in 1975: ‘‘I desperately needed my father and brothers to give me male models I could respect, because white men . . . offered man as dominator, as killer, and always as hypocrite. My father failed because he copied the hypocrisy. And my brothers—except for one—never understood they must represent half the world to me, as I must represent the other half to them’’ (Gardens 330–31). Walker’s assertion of a mutual need between men and women to reflect the opposite half of the world is discordant with her disapproval of the loyalty some black women feel towards black men. Her perception that there was an absence of adequate young-adult male images within her childhood influences her literary portrayals of young black males: The central characters are flat stereotypes depicting, as Bradley notes, images of malevolence or impotence (34). Also, one might ask whether Walker’s alienated perception of the males in her family was involved with her decision to marry a white man, despite her articulation of a problem with the image of the white male. Walker’s father died in 1973, before she had effected a reconciliation with him, and his death aggravated her alienation before it propelled her toward confronting it. She told David Bradley: ‘‘‘You know, his death was harder than I had thought at the time. We were so estranged that when I heard—I was in an airport somewhere—I didn’t think I felt anything. It was years later that I really felt it. We had a wonderful reconciliation after he died’’’ (36). Walker’s estrangement seems to date from her childhood accident. It also appears that her hardheartedness towards her father prevented her grieving for him until quite a while after his death. The year 1973 also marks Walker’s last year in Mississippi, when she continued her struggles against depression and the urge to commit suicide: ‘‘My salvation that last year was a black woman psychiatrist who had also grown up in the South. Though she encouraged me to talk about whether or not I had loved and/or understood my father, I became increasingly aware that I was holding myself responsible for the conditions of black people in America. Unable to murder the oppressors, I sat in a booklined study and wrote about lives . . . ’’ (Gardens 226). The correspondence between the issue that Walker holds against herself and that which

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precipitated her alienation from her father is startling: She feels just as inadequate at rescuing black people as she felt he was inadequate at rescuing her after the childhood accident. As the concerns of her therapist suggest, Walker seems ignorant of her father’s life. It may be this ignorance that she tried to relieve on the visit to her father’s grave that she reports in the Bradley interview: ‘‘‘I didn’t cry when he died, but that summer I was in terrible shape. And I went to Georgia and I went to the cemetery and I laid down on top of his grave. I wanted to see what he could see, if he could look up. And I started to cry. And all the knottedness that had been in our relationship dissolved. And we’re fine now’’’ (36). Since Walker elsewhere says that it took years for her to allow herself to grieve for her father, it is difficult to take literally this assertion of dissolved knottedness. Moreover, this account seems to undercut her 1975 statement concerning her father’s sexism: ‘‘It was not until I became a student of women’s liberation ideology that I could understand and forgive my father’’ (Gardens 330). The persona of the poem ‘‘Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning’’ insists that there is real forgiveness of the father and a ‘‘healing / of all our wounds’’ (Good Night 53), but the more the persona speaks of forgiveness the less assured the reader feels that Walker’s fundamental attitude towards her father has changed, especially when one considers her fictive portrayal of men. Yet it is certain that finding ways to forgive her father has been a continuing concern of Alice Walker’s. In 1975 she had not yet laid to rest the ghost of her father. She reveals that she perceives older men as father figures: ‘‘Dr. Benton, a friend of Zora [Neale Hurston]’s and a practicing M.D. in Fort Pierce, is one of those old, good-looking men whom I always have trouble not liking. (It no longer bothers me that I may be constantly searching for father figures; by this time, I have found several and dearly enjoyed them all.)’’ (Gardens 109). Speaking of Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps in 1971, Walker observed that ‘‘We must cherish our old men’’ (Gardens 135). And, speaking of old men as a category, she notes, ‘‘I love old men’’ (Gardens 138). The persona’s attitudes and attachments to older men suggest that she may be in search of someone with whom she can play the role of darling, even daughter, to complete a circle involving a father figure that she abandoned in childhood in

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the aftermath of an accident. Elderly black men are portrayed with at least approval and often veneration because she liked her grandfathers who to her appeared to be gentle, in contrast to younger adult black males. Walker says, ‘‘‘I knew both my grandfathers and they were just doting, indulgent, sweet old men. I just loved them both and they were crazy about me’’’ (Bradley 36). An ongoing effect of her childhood accident seems to be that she sees younger men (who would be in the age range that her father was when she became alienated from him and her brothers) with a jaundiced eye. Walker’s attitude towards her father is further uncovered by the connections she draws between a dream she had of him while she was in Cuba (during which he returned to look at her with something missing in his eyes) and her meeting with a Cuban revolutionary, Pablo Diaz, once a poor sugar cane cutter who had risen to the role of an ‘‘official spokesperson for the Cuban Institute for Friendship Among Peoples.’’ Of Diaz she says, ‘‘Helping to throw off his own oppressors obviously had given him a pride in himself that nothing else could, and as he talked, I saw in his eyes a quality my own father’s eyes had sometimes lacked: the absolute assurance that he was a man whose words—because he had helped destroy a way of life he despised— would always be heard, with respect, by his children’’ (Gardens 214). Walker’s response to the Cuban revolutionary exposes circular and emotional reasoning: She may not respect her father because, since he did not bring about the end to his own oppression, he did not afford any assurance that what he said would be respected. Walker might be paraphrased, ‘‘I don’t respect you because you don’t expect me to respect you’’; or, more to the point, ‘‘I don’t respect you because you have not fulfilled my expectations.’’ It appears that in her nonfictive assertions concerning her father, Walker plays the role of a victim who has become angry and bitter because the person she expects to rescue her is himself a victim (as well as a persecutor). (This attitude is similar to that she expresses when she attacks the judgment of the black community that will not protect black women accosted by black men.) She will not bear the sight of her father’s anguish; she will not bear its weight on her consciousness. And his anguish is all the more unbearable because Walker, as a child, naturally expected him to be her protector, her comforter, her inspiration, her rescuer. Undoubtedly, one should not

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expect an eight-year-old, gripped by the physical and psychic trauma of impending blindness, to cope with the imperfection of her father (and also her older brothers). Moreover, to his plight as a sharecropper, one must add whatever may have been his personal shortcomings in order to get an accurate picture of the child’s confrontation with his inadequacies. Walker was not merely disappointed but also frustrated by her father’s anguish: She could not rescue him or make him into what she wanted or expected him to be, just as she has been unable to rescue black people. In other words, her continual rejection and condemnation of black people because they are either victims, persecutors, or inadequate rescuers may be, indeed, a reflection of her unresolved attitudes towards her father. Walker’s suicidal impulses may be the result of her feeling like a child who is unable to be a daughter and a darling because no one appears (or remains) adequate to be the father she discarded as a child. Like a pendulum, Walker’s recorded attitudes swing slowly back and forth between a victim’s suicidal depression and a persecutor’s deadly anger and thirst for revenge. The personas of the adult Walker continue to reject the father of her youth (all young men) waiting for her in her dreams and search out older men who fit her perceptions of her grandfathers, who appear to be adequate enough to rescue her, and for whom she can be a darling. She may be in search of not so much our mothers’ gardens as our fathers’ protecting arms. . . . Source: Philip M. Royster, ‘‘In Search of Our Fathers’ Arms: Alice Walker’s Persona of the Alienated Darling,’’ in Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 20, No. 4, Winter 1986, pp. 347–67.

SOURCES Carmichael, Kay, ‘‘Alice Walker’s ‘Goodnight, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning,’’’ in Sin and Forgiveness: New Responses in a Changing World, Ashgate, 2003, pp. 42–43. Davis, Thadious, ‘‘Poetry as Preface to Fiction,’’ in Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives, Past and Present, edited by Henry Louis Gate, Jr., and K. A. Appiah, Amistad, 1993, pp. 275–83. Freedman, Estelle, No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women, Ballantine, 2003. Nowak, Hanna, ‘‘Poetry Celebrating Life,’’ in Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives, Past and Present, edited

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by Henry Louis Gate, Jr., and K. A. Appiah, Amistad, 1993, pp. 179–92.

and it speaks to the subject matter of much of her writing.

Royster, Philip M., ‘‘In Search of Our Fathers’ Arms: Alice Walker’s Persona of the Alienated Darling,’’ in Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 20, No. 4, Winter 1986, pp. 347–70.

Griswold, Charles L., Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration, Cambridge University Press, 2007. In this volume, Griswold explores the main theme of Walker’s poem, including a history of the concept as it has changed over time. The volume provides insight into the religious and historical ideals that inform Walker’s work.

Walker, Alice, ‘‘Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning,’’ in Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning, Doubleday, 1979, p. 53. White, Evelyn C., Alice Walker: A Life, W. W. Norton, 2005. Williams, Juan, Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954–1965, Penguin, 1988.

FURTHER READING Chafe, William H., Raymond Gavins, and Robert Korstad, eds., Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South, New Press, 2008. A compilation of first-person accounts, this book includes details of life in the segregated South as told by the people who lived in it. This volume illuminates Walker’s childhood,

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McKay, Nellie Y., and Henry Louis Gates, eds., The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, W. W. Norton, 2nd edition, 2003. This anthology includes all manner of African American literature, from poetry to blues and gospel songs and short stories. It includes selections by Walker, as well as by such notable African American writers as Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and Audre Lord. Morrison, Toni, Beloved, Knopf, 1987. A landmark novel by a female African American author and contemporary of Walker’s, Beloved is as well loved as Walker’s The Color Purple. Set just after the end of the Civil War, the story features a group of freed slaves who struggle to cope with their past.

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I, Too ‘‘I, Too’’ was included in Langston Hughes’s first collection of poetry, The Weary Blues, published in 1926. The poem reflects Hughes’s dream that one day segregation will end. According to the poem, when that happens, all men, white and black, will sit together at the same table, sharing equally in the opportunities that the American dream offers. ‘‘I, Too’’ is a response to nineteenth-century American poet Walt Whitman’s ‘‘I Hear America Singing.’’ Where Whitman rejoices in a country that offers him all that he wants, Hughes’s poem makes clear that the United States does not provide a joyous experience for all its citizens. Hughes’s poem is deceptively simple; its straightforward structure and deliberate choice of words suggest strength and determination. Hughes wrote ‘‘I, Too’’ in 1924 while stranded in Genoa, Italy, after his passport and wallet were stolen. Genoa had a busy port and Hughes tried to catch a ride back to the United States as a deckhand, but no ship would take him. After watching several white men easily get rides, Hughes wrote ‘‘I, Too’’ and mailed it to New York, hoping to sell the poem and make some money. There is no record of whether the poem brought Hughes any money, but the poem’s theme of inequality reflects the world that Hughes saw around him, a world in which white sailors were free to refuse to serve with a black man, thus stranding him in Italy with no identification or money.

LANGSTON HUGHES 1926

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had remarried. The family settled in Lincoln, Illinois, where Hughes enrolled at Central High School. Hughes did well in high school and began writing poetry for the school magazine. After graduation, he spent a year living with his father in Mexico, where he wrote poetry and a short play for children, both of which were published in 1921 in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) magazine Brownies’ Book. Another poem and an essay were published in Crisis, also in 1921.

Langston Hughes (The Library of Congress)

‘‘I, Too’’ is widely anthologized. In addition to its inclusion in The Weary Blues, it is included in such volumes as The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (1995), Langston Hughes: Poems (1999) and African American Literature: An Anthology of Nonfiction, Fiction, Poetry, and Drama (1993).

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY James Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, on February 1, 1902, to Carrie Langston and James Nathaniel Hughes. Hughes’s father was unable to find steady employment in Joplin and, by the time his son was eighteen months old, he decided to move to Mexico to live. Hughes’s mother refused to join her husband and began traveling from city to city looking for work. Hughes’s parents were later divorced. Although Hughes occasionally accompanied his mother as she traveled, for much of his childhood he was raised by his maternal grandmother in Lawrence, Kansas. For a year after his grandmother’s death in 1915, Hughes lived occasionally with his mother and sometimes with a family friend. By 1916, he was again living with his mother, who

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Hughes then enrolled at Columbia University in New York City, where he encountered racism on campus, especially in the dormitories; as a result, he left after his first year. For the next year and a half, he worked odd jobs and wrote poetry. In 1923, Hughes was able to find work as a cabin boy on a ship bound for Africa. He returned to the United States within the year but then left for Paris a few months later. After he returned to the United States in 1924 Hughes lived in Washington, D.C., and again worked a series of odd jobs while writing poetry. He was working as a busboy at a hotel restaurant in 1925 when he gave some of his poems to the poet Vachel Lindsay. The next day, Hughes read in a newspaper that Lindsay had discovered a Negro busboy poet. Lindsay told Hughes to find a publisher. That same year, Hughes won a poetry prize sponsored by the Urban League. At the award ceremony Hughes was asked by critic Carl Van Vechten if Hughes had enough poems to publish a book. Hughes’s first collection of poems, which included ‘‘I, Too,’’ was published as The Weary Blues in 1926. In 1926, Hughes returned to college, enrolling at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. While at Lincoln, Hughes’s second collection of poetry, Fine Clothes to the Jew was published in 1927. The same year, Hughes met Charlotte Mason while visiting New York City. She briefly became his literary patron and helped to provide the financial support for Hughes’s first novel, Not Without Laughter, which Hughes revised after he graduated from Lincoln in 1929 and submitted for publication in 1930. Hughes won the Harmon Gold Medal in 1931 and a four-hundred-dollar cash prize for this first novel. During this time, Hughes was also working with Zora Neale Hurston on a play that they called Mule Bone. When she submitted the play as her sole work, refusing to share royalties, Hughes broke off his friendship with Hurston.

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Hughes’s first collection of short fiction, The Ways of White Folks, was published in 1934 and a series of sketches known as his Simple tales, which were about a black Everyman, were published in the Chicago Defender. The Simple tales were very popular with African American readers and were eventually published in a series of books, as Simple Speaks His Mind (1950) and Simple Takes a Wife (1953). Hughes always considered himself primarily a poet. Over the course of his life, more than twenty collections of his poetry were published, including The Negro Mother (1931), The Dream Keeper and Other Poems (1932), Jim Crow’s Last Stand (1943), and Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951). In addition to the poetry, drama, novels, and short stories that he created, Hughes wrote two autobiographies and a number of essays. Although his work sometimes received mixed reactions from black individuals who were concerned that he emphasized lower-class life and presented an unfavorable image of his race, Hughes’s work was a critical success. He received many writing awards during his life, including a Guggenheim fellowship in 1935, a Rosenwald fellowship in 1941, a National Institute and American Academy of Arts and Letters grant in 1947, and a Spingarn Medal, presented by the NAACP in 1960. Hughes became the first black poet to earn a living through his writing. Hughes died of congestive heart failure on May 22, 1967, at the age of sixty-five. During his lifetime he published nearly fifty books.

POEM TEXT I, too, sing America. I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes, But I laugh, And eat well, And grow strong.

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Tomorrow, I’ll be at the table When company comes. Nobody’ll dare Say to me, ‘‘Eat in the kitchen,’’ Then.

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Besides, They’ll see how beautiful I am And be ashamed—

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I, too, am America.

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POEM SUMMARY Stanza 1 The first stanza of ‘‘I, Too’’ consists of only one line, in which the speaker asserts that he is also celebrating being an American. The title, with its use of the word too suggests that the speaker is replying to another literary work. The emphasis in the line is on this word, since that is the most important word in this four-word line. In fact, ‘‘I, Too’’ is a response to Walt Whitman’s 1860 poem, ‘‘I Hear America Singing.’’ Whitman’s poem celebrates American patriotism. The poet lists a number of different professions, including a carpenter and a mason, all of whom sing about their happiness at being American. Hughes’s response is a reminder that black Americans also form part of this culture. By beginning with the singular personal pronoun, I, Hughes quickly establishes that the poet is also the subject of the poem. He also sings of the greatness of the United States just as Whitman’s singers of the nineteenth century sang their tribute.

Stanza 2 In the second stanza, the narrator begins by defining himself as a brother, albeit the darker brother who is set apart, segregated from his white brother when company visits. The use of the word brother is not intended to be read as the literal brother but symbolically, as all men are brothers. All Americans are united as one. The United States welcomes all people to its shores and offers all the opportunity to achieve the American dream. Hughes’s poem, however, suggests that not all Americans are given the same opportunity to achieve their dreams. Some— those with dark skin—are cast aside and kept from achieving the dream. Hughes reminds his readers that those people are equal to all others; they are brothers to the white majority. The second line of stanza 2 refers to more than just being sent to the kitchen to eat. African Americans were victims of Jim Crow laws in the 1920s, when Hughes was a young writer. These laws kept black people separate from white people on public transportation, in restaurants, in theaters, at drinking fountains, and in public bathrooms. Miscegenation laws made it illegal for a black person to marry a white person, and poll taxes and literacy tests kept black Americans from voting. Black children were educated separately from white children. Hughes’s reference to being sent to the kitchen when company

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MEDIA ADAPTATIONS Hughes reads ‘‘I, Too’’ on the recording Anthology of Negro Poetry, released in 1954 by Folkways Records.  Hughes reads ‘‘I, Too’’ on the recording The Dream Keeper and Other Poems of Langston Hughes, released in 1955 by Folkways Records and rereleased in 2004 by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. 



Hughes reads ‘‘I, Too’’ on the recording The Voice of Langston Hughes, released in 1995 by Smithsonian Folkways Records.



Hughes reads ‘‘I, Too’’ on the recording American Black History, released in 2008 by Master Classics Records.

arrived is intended to represent all of the ways in which blacks and whites were separated in American life during the early twentieth century. The last three lines of this stanza are a reminder that the darker brothers, who are cast aside, are not defeated. The poet suggests that he uses the time in which he has been segregated to his own advantage. He is able to grow stronger. The second stanza establishes that segregation is still a part of life for many black Americans, but the last lines of the stanza indicate that segregation will not last.

Stanza 3 This stanza begins with only a word. Tomorrow is a word filled with hope that the next day will be better than the current one. The first lines of stanza 3 are a promise that the world will change for black Americans. Someday they will not live in segregation, isolated from the rest of humankind. Someday, whenever that elusive ‘‘tomorrow’’ occurs, black brothers will not be separated from their white brothers. They will all be at the same table, enjoying the abundance that all Americans experience. This is the promise of the American dream, which will someday be enjoyed by all people, black and white.

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In the last few lines of stanza 3, the poet issues a warning. There will come a time when no one will cast him aside and when no American will be cast aside because his skin is darker. The poet is issuing a challenge. He is daring anyone who thinks that black people can be cast aside to try and hold him back. He makes clear that when tomorrow arrives and black people are treated as equals, the past cannot then be recalled. Once the dark brother sits at the table, he will not willingly return to the past.

Stanza 4 In stanza 4, the narrator reminds readers that there are additional reasons for giving the black American the equality he deserves. Although the narrator suggests that his beauty provides a reason to end segregation, he is not talking solely about the kind of physical beauty that sets him apart from other people. He is talking about the beauty of existence. There is beauty in life, in living. The poet claims that once white people realize that black people are beautiful, they will be ashamed that they denied black people their equality. This is an optimistic view that all people will regret segregation. The speaker is hopeful that all people will see that each human being deserves life and opportunity.

Stanza 5 The final line of this poem parallels the first line, with only a single word change. The poet is an American. Where the opening line claims that the poet joins his white brothers in singing to celebrate America, in the final lines, the speaker states that he is America. The speaker, an individual, suggests that he also represents all Americans and American values. This final line is a declaration of equality, a resounding claim to equal opportunity to achieve the American dream.

THEMES American Identity Hughes’s poem ‘‘I, Too’’ explores the duality of identity that defined black life in the United States in the 1920s. Black Americans claimed citizenship in a country that denied black citizens the same rights that were provided to white citizens. The poet claims that he is an American and entitled to the same privileges as all other

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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY 





Writing a response to a poem written by another poet is a common literary activity undertaken by many poets. Hughes’s poem is a response to Walt Whitman’s poem, ‘‘I Hear America Singing.’’ Take the first line of ‘‘I, Too’’ and write a poem of at least fifteen lines that responds to Hughes’s poem. Write a brief paragraph to attach to your poem in which you evaluate what your poem says about your identity as an American. Read Hughes’s poem aloud to yourself and then read it aloud to an audience of friends or classmates. Ask one or two of your friends to read the poem aloud and listen to their voices, noting the inflections of tone as they read aloud. What do you discover about the poem in each of these readings? Does the poem seem to change with different readings? Prepare a one-page reflection paper in which you discuss what you learn about the poem when you hear it aloud. Read Whitman’s poem ‘‘I Hear America Singing’’ and compare it to Hughes’s poem

Americans, including the right to eat with Americans of any racial or ethnic background. ‘‘I, Too’’ shows the poet trying to establish his identity through the progress of the poem. In the beginning of the poem, the narrator embraces his right to sing America, the same as all other people who sing to celebrate America. Ironically, his identity as an American grows stronger each time he is cast out of American society. Each time he is excluded, the process reinforces his identity as an American, until he is finally strong enough to demand that he be recognized as an American. By the last line of the poem, the narrator no longer sings of America’s greatness; he is America’s greatness. He is ready to claim the identity that has been too-long denied him. He is an American.

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‘‘I, Too.’’ In an essay, compare such elements as content, theme, tone, syntax, and word choice. In your evaluation of these two works, consider the different approaches of these two male poets. Can these differences be attributed to the historical context of each work or to some other influence? 

Although it is often compared to Whitman’s poem, Hughes’s poem ‘‘I, Too’’ might also be compared to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ‘‘I Have a Dream’’ speech of August 1963. After either reading or listening to King’s speech, prepare an oral report in which you discuss the nature of each man’s dream for African Americans.



Research the Harlem Renaissance and write a paper in which you discuss Hughes’s literary role in this movement. You may also consider how white Americans responded to the Harlem Renaissance and to Hughes’s work, including the role of white patronage in the movement.

Equality & Inequality In Hughes’s poem, the poet shares his hope for a future in which all black people will share equally with white people. The poet looks toward a tomorrow in which black Americans will be invited to sit at the table with white Americans and share in the same dreams and opportunities that white people have enjoyed. Hughes is not only demanding equality for all black people, he is demanding that black people no longer be willing to leave the table just for white people to use. The poet envisions a future when all will sit at the same table, when equality will not be a dream but a reality. In stanza 2, when he promises that he will grow stronger, he is rejecting the world as it exists and claiming a world that will exist tomorrow. The ‘‘tomorrow’’ of the poem is still a dream,

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A policeman talks with two young women arrested on trespassing charges at a restaurant in Atlanta in 1962. The women, one white and the other African American, refused to leave when asked by restaurant employees. (AP Images)

but it is representative of the dreams of a better life that caused so many immigrants to leave their homes and come to the United States. It is the promise of a future in which every person will have the opportunity to live the American dream. This is a tomorrow when all human beings will be recognized as beautiful and equally deserving of life. For Hughes, the dream is still just that—a dream. But he does promise that when he is strong enough, no one will dare to deny him what he deserves: the same chance, the same opportunity, the same equality that all white Americans enjoy.

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Segregation In ‘‘I, Too’’ the poet demands that basic rights for all humanity be extended to all people, regardless of skin color. In the second stanza, the poet states that black people are not invited to sit at the same table as their white brothers. Instead, blacks are relegated to the kitchen, where the reader presumes that less important people congregate. The table and the kitchen in the poem are symbolic of the many areas in which blacks and whites are separated. They are separated in restaurants, as the poem suggests, and they are separated on public transportation, in theaters, and in public

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restrooms. African Americans also live in separate neighborhoods and are offered lower-paying jobs. They attend segregated schools and are often subject to violent attacks. All of this segregation is represented by the metaphor of the kitchen. He envisions a future in which all people will sit at the same table. Blacks and whites will attend the same schools and live in the same neighborhoods. The poet goes beyond hoping that tomorrow will be better for black Americans; he proclaims that it will be so. His claim that he is also an American is a call for the end of segregation.

STYLE Free Verse Free verse is verse with no discernable structure, rhyme scheme, or meter. Free verse allows the poet to fit the poetic line to the content of the poem. The poet is not restricted by the need to shape the poem to a particular meter but can instead create a varied or irregular rhythm and syntax, or sentence structure. Free verse is not the same as blank verse, which also does not use a rhyme scheme. Blank verse almost always adheres to iambic pentameter, while free verse relies on line breaks to create a rhythm. Free verse was a popular style of poetic composition in the twentieth century and it was not uncommon for poets of Hughs’s time to compose in free verse. Whitman, to whom Hughes responds in this poem, is sometimes called the father of free verse. There is no pattern of formal rhyme or meter to ‘‘I, Too’’ and, instead, the irregular line breaks give the poem a songlike rhythm that is most pronounced when the poem is read aloud. Over the course of his career, Hughes was renowned for the musicality of his verse. Many of the poems published alongside ‘‘I, Too’’ in The Weary Blues are songs.

Metaphor A metaphor is an analogy that identifies one object with another and ascribes to one object the qualities of a second object. A metaphor can also be an object used to represent an idea. The metaphor may be simple, as with a single comparison, or extended, where one object is central to the meaning of the work. For example, the table in Hughes’s poem represents status, power, and opportunity, which the darker brother is denied by being relegated to the kitchen. The

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kitchen represents segregation and lack of opportunity. When blacks sit at the same table as whites, true equality will result.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT The ‘‘New Negro’’ and the Harlem Renaissance In March 1925, Howard University professor, Alain Locke coined the term ‘‘The New Negro’’ for a special issue of Survey Graphic that emphasized and celebrated the diversity of black life in the United States. Of particular interest to Locke were the many examples of black art, literature, and intellectual thought that heralded a new life for black people and communities. Locke thought that this creative expression was an essential component of a progressive community in which black Americans contributed their talents and would then be recognized as contributing to the formation of one nation. Locke envisioned the ‘‘new Negro’’ as representative of greater self-respect and self-reliance. The new Negro was a black American who contributed to his social and cultural community and for Locke the center of this change was in Harlem. The influx of southern black Americans into the North included many young and talented writers, intellectuals, actors, musicians, and artists. Many of these talented young black men and women moved into the center of black life in Harlem, the area north of 125th Street in Upper Manhattan. Theater, literature, art, and music that depicted black life flourished. White customers became audiences and patrons, allowing for greater support of black talent. The creation of two major periodicals, The Crisis, published by the NAACP and Opportunity, published by the National Urban League, provided a forum for the publication of black art, literature, and intellectual opinions. Many black intellectuals thought that the cultural renaissance that was taking place in Harlem would allow blacks to erase many of the false images that had been perpetuated about black life since the end of the Civil War. The Harlem Renaissance was the first formal literary movement that focused solely on the work of black writers. The literature of this period was a self-conscious exploration of racism and identity, particularly what it meant to be black and an American. This duality of life as an

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COMPARE & CONTRAST 

1920s: An influx of black men and women from the South move north, hoping to create a better life in the industrial cities where there is less segregation. In the 1920s, Harlem, a borough in New York City, becomes the center for black poetry, drama, and music. The decade of artistic growth is known as the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes is a major poet of this movement.

still occur. In June 2005, the U.S. Senate apologizes for its failure to ever pass antilynching legislation. 

Today: Many of the dance halls and theaters that were associated with the Harlem Renaissance, including the Savoy Ballroom, have been torn down. In their place are churches, grocery stores, and parking lots. The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem maintains photographs and historical documents associated with the Harlem Renaissance that help to recall the way the city used to appear. 

1920s: In 1920, Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) holds its national convention in Harlem. The UNIA is the first effort to unite all individuals of African descent into one nation. In 1921, the UNIA negotiates with the government of Liberia to acquire land that will be used by black emigrants from the United States who want to return to Africa. Negotiations for a proposed African American homeland eventually fail.

Today: The UNIA continues to exist as a humanitarian and social organization working for equality and to improve the lives of people of African ancestry.  1920s: Between 1920 and 1925, 225 black Americans are known to have been lynched. The U.S. House of Representatives passes three anti-lynching bills between 1920 and 1940, but the Senate does not pass any antilynching bills during this period. Today: Lynching is extremely rare, though hate crimes, or crimes based on prejudice,

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1920s: In 1925, Alain Locke, a Rhodes Scholar and Harvard University Ph.D. graduate, publishes an anthology called The New Negro. Locke’s book examines the diversity of black life in the United States following the influx of southern blacks to large northern cities. Today: Where Locke was focused on the intermingling of educated, city, rural, and folk black life at the beginning of the twentieth century, black neighborhoods at the beginning of the twenty-first century are more ethnically diverse. In the last decade of the twentieth century, a large influx of African Caribbean immigrants settle in northern cities. In some large cities, the number of Caribbean blacks account for 25 percent or more of the black population.



1920s: On August 8, 1925, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), which claims anywhere from three to five million members in the 1920s, marches down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. More than forty thousand members of the KKK show up to march in support of white supremacy. Today: Though far less extensive than it once was, the KKK remains active in the United States and still holds events, including rallies at Gettysburg National Military Park in Pennsylvania; Antietam National Battlefield near Sharpsburg, Maryland; and Harpers Ferry National Historical Park in West Virginia. At these rallies Klansmen are protected by the U.S. Park Police on the basis of the First Amendment’s grant of freedom of speech. The KKK closely guards membership information, but it is known that Klan membership has dropped since the 1980s and is believed to consist of fewer than six thousand.

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American and as a black American was a common theme of writers during the Harlem Reassurance, as it is in Hughes’s poem ‘‘I, Too.’’ The speaker evokes the image of two brothers, one white and one black. The dark brother is excluded from the life of the white brother, but the speaker in the poem prophesies that the world is changing and that eventually the dark brother will be equally recognized as an American. Hughes’s effort to create two lives within his poem is one of the defining characteristics of the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes was a principal writer of this period. His writing helped to illuminate the lives of ordinary black citizens and corrected distorted images of African Americans as stereotypical figures in literature and entertainment. The Harlem Renaissance ended shortly after the stock market crash of 1929, but Hughes’s contributions to the Harlem Renaissance help to illustrate the important impact of black artists in American society.

Injustice, Inequity, and Segregation in the United States The Harlem Renaissance was a result of a great migration of southern blacks to the northern United States. The reasons for this migration were varied. In some cases, African Americans fled to the North because there were greater economic opportunities. These economic opportunities were a result of changes in immigration laws in 1921 and 1924 that severely limited the number of new immigrants allowed into the United States. New immigrants had been a continuing source of cheap labor. With that resource severely limited, northern factories and businesses looked to the southern states for a source of cheap labor. Northern employers needed labor that was close at hand, and southern blacks needed jobs and a place to live in relative safety. Many of these new black migrants were looking for better jobs, housing, and education. In the early twentieth century the American South was a place that offered few opportunities for African Americans. As Hughes noted in ‘‘I, Too,’’ there were two separate Americas for black and white citizens. While the end of the Civil War promised freedom to slaves, the end of slavery did not bring freedom from discrimination, segregation, or racial violence. After Civil War Reconstruction ended in 1876, many southern states began to create laws, called Jim Crow laws, that segregated African

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Americans. Sharecropping practices prevented black farmers from owning their own land, while separate school systems kept black children from receiving an education equal to that received by white children. Blacks and whites lived in separate neighborhoods and ate at separate restaurants; they also used separate public drinking fountains and bathrooms. Violence, including lynching, prevented many African Americans from taking action against Jim Crow laws. The emergence of the second Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in the early 1920s (the first KKK had been formed in 1865 by a group of Confederate army veterans) added to the atmosphere of hatred and fear directed against blacks. There was little justice for African Americans in the South, who rarely protested against this discrimination. Even though many black Americans moved north to escape hostility, the North was not free of racial violence. The same fear of outsiders and the competition for jobs that had led to stricter immigration policies in the early 1920s also led to several race riots in northern cities. The KKK was active in the North as well as in the South. In spite of encountering some of the same problems in the North that they had endured in the South, many southern black Americans found greater freedom and less oppression in the northern cities.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW When Hughes’s first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, was published in 1926, both the author and his work received a great deal more attention than would be customary for either a young black poet or first book of poetry. In part, the extra attention was due to Hughes winning a 1925 poetry prize sponsored by Opportunity magazine for the title poem, ‘‘The Weary Blues.’’ The same poem also won a prize offered by Crisis magazine. Even more important than these two prizes was the introduction to The Weary Blues, written by Carl Van Vechten, an important critic for the New York Times and patron of the Harlem Renaissance. Thus, critics at nearly forty newspapers and magazines published reviews of The Weary Blues. Many of these reviews claim that Hughes is ‘‘destined to be one of the great poets of his race,’’ in the words of Ruth Peiter, writing for the Toledo Times Sunday magazine. Peiter notes that Hughes’s poems invoke ‘‘many moods,’’

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which reflect Hughes’s experiences from extensive traveling. Among the varied poems in this first collection are those that ‘‘are like a cry from the heart of his race.’’ In his review for the New York Herald Tribune Books, critic Du Bose Heyward concurs with other critics, who envision a great future for Hughes. According to Heyward, Hughes captures the rhythms, the mood, and the very essence of jazz in his poetry. Hughes’s ability to turn jazz into poetry is a talent that Corinne Meaux notes in her review, published in the New York Amsterdam News, of The Weary Blues. Meaux writes that each poem in Hughes’s first collection of poetry is like ‘‘a brilliant splotch among the riot of colors that blend themselves into Negro life in America.’’ Meaux suggests that Hughes is able to capture Harlem’s night life in ‘‘jazzy poetry throbbing with syncopated rhythm.’’ Not all reviews in Hughes’s day were glowing, however. Writing in the Boston Transcript, a critic known only by his or her initials, F. B. B., states that the prize-winning poem, ‘‘The Weary Blues’’ contains the ‘‘dominant note that is a mark of the thinking black man, i.e., a touch of tragedy blended with cynicism and a heart tearing melancholy.’’ According to F. B. B., ‘‘only a Negro poet can write on mundane subjects and fill his readers with a sense of racial rhythm and melody.’’ While F. B. B. is enthusiastic about the title poem, the critic asserts that ‘‘much of the poetry within the volume is crude.’’ ‘‘I, Too,’’ according to F. B. B., ‘‘strikes a warning note’’ about what might happen ‘‘when the great black tide of American Negroes’’ surge into ‘‘present-day higher civilization.’’ F. B. B. ends by comparing Hughes to Paul Laurence Dunbar, the first African American poet to gain national prominence, at the end of the nineteenth century. Despite the reservations of some critics like F. B. B., the critics who foresaw future success for Hughes proved to be prophetic. In celebration of what would have been Hughes’s one-hundredth birthday in February 2002, Sue Corbett, writing for the Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service, states that ‘‘it is impossible to underestimate the lasting impact of Langston Hughes’ work on American letters.’’ In her article, ‘‘Langston Hughes: The Gentle Giant of the Harlem Renaissance,’’ Corbett claims that Hughes ‘‘brought the literary excellence of black writers to the attention of the world.’’ As Stephen Kinzer notes in his New York Times tribute to Hughes, ‘‘For a Poet,

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Centennial Appreciation,’’ at the centennial celebration of the poet’s birth, Hughes was ‘‘the first African-American to succeed in making his living as a creative writer and the first to have a literary society devoted to studying his life and work.’’ The Langston Hughes Society was founded in 1981. The following year, in 1982, the University of Missouri Press began publishing The Langston Hughes Review, a journal devoted to the study of Hughes’s work.

CRITICISM Sheri Metzger Karmiol Karmiol has a doctorate in English Renaissance literature. She teaches literature and drama at the University of New Mexico, and she is also a professional writer and the author of several reference texts on poetry and drama. In this essay, Karmiol discusses the role of poetry, particularly poems like ‘‘I, Too,’’ in revealing truth and combating injustice and racism. Poetry offers readers a multifaceted opportunity to experience the world in a different way. Poetry can create beauty. It can also be witty and entertaining, sometimes even comedic. But perhaps poetry’s most important functions are to educate readers about injustice and to rouse readers to actions that can change the world. On occasion, poetry illuminates what is hidden, ignored, or just so distasteful that it is buried in the reader’s unconscious mind. Throughout much of the twentieth century, racism was one of those topics that too few people discussed and that far too many people tolerated. Poetry is one tool that can lead to discussions about racism, and perhaps, to change. In his poetry, Langston Hughes is able to depict reality in such a way that readers emerge from their reading of his poetry with knowledge about a world they may not have directly experienced in their lives. A quick and superficial reading of Hughes’s ‘‘I, Too’’ leaves readers with the impression that the poet foresees a time when all Americans will sit together around a table, happy to be at last joined together in a nation in which white and black coexist harmoniously. The truth of the poem is more complex than this and requires that readers carefully consider Hughes’s words. They reveal a deeper truth and a warning: once the black narrator has grown strong, whites will no longer dare to exclude him. The joining

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WHAT DO I READ NEXT?

WHEN, AT THE END OF ‘I, TOO,’ BLACK AND WHITE PEOPLE SIT TOGETHER AT THE TABLE, IT IS IN THE CREATED WORLD OF THE POET, ONE THAT HE INSISTS WILL ALIGN WITH REALITY.’’

Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927) is Hughes’s second collection of poetry. The central subject is Harlem’s lower class. Hughes also includes several ballads.  The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (1995) includes 860 poems written by Hughes during his career. The poems are arranged chronologically. 

of black and white people envisioned in the poem is not a willing union, but one that occurs because black Americans will no longer tolerate segregation. James Finn Cotter claims in his essay ‘‘The Truth of Poetry,’’ published in The Hudson Review, that ‘‘the truth of poetry is not in reciting facts but in creating veracity.’’ Poetry is not autocratic; rather it must create a reality that readers can locate in the images that the poet produces. This production of reality is even more important for poetry that seeks to expose injustice. Cotter explains that a poem must ‘‘be true to itself.’’ A poem must be honest enough to ‘‘convince me and to capture my attention with its thought, emotion, imagery, and language.’’ An honest poem leaves the reader feeling changed in some way, having experienced an awakening. An important function of poetry, according to Cotter, is to remind readers of ‘‘the injustices and stupidities of small-minded men,’’ who seek to keep other men in their ‘‘place.’’ Poetry, then, does more than offer truth; it illuminates injustice and impeaches those who continue to endorse discrimination. This is what Hughes accomplishes in his image of two separate tables, one table defined by privilege and one table defined by injustice. Hughes is not satisfied to know his ‘‘place’’ and promises a fight when he is strong enough to seize what is rightfully his. ‘‘I, Too’’ reveals the truth about ending segregation— that joining together at one table would not be easy, but it would be deserved, as the last line of the poem promises. When Hughes wrote ‘‘I, Too’’ in the 1920s the world was a long way from ending segregation, but the poet was able to imagine the day when that change would come. In Robert W. Blake’s 1990 essay ‘‘Poets on Poetry: Writing and the Reconstruction of Reality,’’ published in the English Journal, he claims that when a poet creates poetry, he or she ‘‘reconstructs

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The Ways of White Folks (1934) is a collection of short stories that Hughes wrote after he noted similarities between his writing and that of D. H. Lawrence.

In Race, Writing, and Difference (1985) Henry Louis Gates compiles a number of essays that discuss the role of race in literature.  Nikki Giovanni’s Racism 101 (1985) is a collection of essays in which Giovanni, a contemporary black poet, writes about what it means to be a black American and how she feels about her experiences with race and racism. 

Hughes wrote two autobiographies, The Big Sea: An Autobiography (1940, reissued in 1993) and I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey (1956, reissued in 1993). Both of Hughes’s autobiographies document the world in which he lived and can help readers better understand how that world influenced his writings.  Shadowed Dreams: Women’s Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance (2006), edited by Maureen Honey, is an anthology of women’s poetry composed between 1919 and 1939. The poems in this anthology are divided into four sections—Protest, Heritage, Love and Passion, and Nature. Although most readers will find that the poets’ names are unfamiliar, their poems complement Hughes’s poetry, as these women poets also focus on inequality and lack of opportunity. 

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reality.’’ The poet uses his or her imagination to create a new reality for the reader. The hope and expectation is that eventually the imagined reality will become a new reality. This is also what Percy Bysshe Shelley argues in A Defense of Poetry, first published in 1840, when he claims that poetry does not simply reflect the world, it changes the world. Poetry makes things happen. When Hughes weaves his narrative about merging two separate Americas, one for blacks and one for whites, he is envisioning a future changed and a society created with equality for both races. When, at the end of ‘‘I, Too,’’ black and white people sit together at the table, it is in the created world of the poet, one that he insists will align with reality. The creation of a new world is what Shelley emphasizes when he writes of the social importance of poetry, which plays upon the subconscious and thus can transcend ideology and can create ‘‘anew the universe,’’ a universe without unjust laws. This is because, for Shelley, poets ‘‘are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society.’’ Poetry is more than beauty, much more than just words; it is useful and beneficial to society because it removes distinctions like class, gender, and by extension, race. According to Shelley, a person must possess the ability to imagine the pain of others, to ‘‘put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.’’ Poetry allows readers to feel the pain of the poet— in this case, to experience the anguish of being excluded from the same world in which whites are given privilege and blacks are denied the same opportunities to succeed. Poetry provides an opportunity for the reader to imagine another world. Hughes creates that kind of opportunity when he allows readers to imagine the pain of being excluded and then to see a tomorrow in which the poet will be included. Shelley claims that for a ‘‘man, to be greatly good, [he] must imagine intensely and comprehensively.’’ The poet’s ability, as defined by Shelley, is not only to behold ‘‘intensely the present at it is,’’ or as it should be, according to moral laws, but to hold forth the promise of ‘‘the future in the present.’’ The poet allows readers to envision a better world, in which an unjust world can be changed, just as Hughes does in ‘‘I, Too.’’ Because selfish men are reluctant to change unjust laws, poetry is, as Shelley claims, ‘‘never more to be desired than at periods’’ when ‘‘an excess of selfish and calculating principle’’ exceeds the laws of

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human nature. It is the poet who fulfills the need for change by creating poetry that illuminates the injustice of the world and the need for a better world. The poet, then, is the bridge from inhumanity to humanity. The poet’s ability to use his art to expose the truth is perhaps his greatest obligation. Poetry is in the unique position of being able to tell the truth, even when the truth might be unpleasant or even dangerous. Not all readers take the time to understand the nuances of poetry; therefore, the poet is sometimes able to cleverly disguise meaning, using the language of poetry. The meaning can be confused and explained away as simply a poem misunderstood. For example, Andrew Marvell did this in his poem, ‘‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland.’’ Because the ode is a poetic form used to celebrate greatness, it is not immediately clear to the reader that Marvell is being sarcastic in his faint praise of Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth. The Horatian ode, in particular, is reserved for praising and honoring a great man. However, in this ode Marvell compares Cromwell to Caesar, who was assassinated as a tyrant. Marvell’s depiction of the deposed King Charles I, as he meets his death on the scaffold, is one of noble kingship. Cromwell might have been confused about whether Marvell was praising him, but scholars who dissect the poem know that Marvell was doing quite the opposite. Since Marvell did not lose his head over his ode, presumably Cromwell did not probe the poem’s truth too closely. In his essay, Blake argues that ‘‘poetry is for telling people what they hadn’t noticed or thought about before.’’ Poetry brings injustice into public view and exposes the inequities of human existence. Whether in exposing a tyrant for the murder of a king or in exposing prejudice, poets use words, says Blake, to ‘‘reveal what people and living creatures are really like.’’ Readers can see the truth and the injustice in Hughes’s words. Therefore they can also envision the need to change the world. In The Defence of Poesy, sixteenth-century poet Sir Philip Sidney defends the work of poets to the Puritan writer Stephen Gosson who, in his 1579 text Schoole of Abuse, argues that poetry is a waste of time, that it is composed of lies, and that it teaches sinful practices. Sidney’s response to these claims argues that the role of literature in a civilized society is to educate and to inspire people to undertake ethical and virtuous actions.

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That is also the hope four hundred years later. Hughes wrote ‘‘I, Too’’ after being denied several opportunities in Genoa, Italy, to board ships bound for the United States. White crews did not want to work with a black man. ‘‘I, Too’’ is a testimony to the need for change, for all humankind to recognize the rights of others. The best way to comprehend this need for change is to visualize a world in which equality is denied. In an essay for the English Journal that argues for the importance of reading modern poetry, Virginia M. Schauble suggests that poetry ‘‘can actually be a voice of rare clarity.’’ Poetry allows readers to experience a world they have never known, a world in which people are oppressed and denied basic human rights. In her essay, ‘‘Reading American Modernist Poetry with High-School Seniors,’’ Schauble points out that poetry’s value ‘‘is not merely aesthetic’’; instead, poetry ‘‘speaks a word counter to cultural expectations.’’ It forces readers to think about difference and about changing the world. Poetry creates change and, as Sidney argued so many centuries earlier, it urges readers to ethical actions. Poetry has an important role in the modern world, just as it did in the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries when Sidney and Shelley each argued so eloquently for its worth in their worlds, which were also filled with conflict and injustice. Poetry can teach readers about truth, but it can also teach readers about the difference between right and wrong. Poetry can create the expectation of change and the desire to make that change real. Most importantly, poetry is a way to learn the truth about the world we live in. ‘‘I, Too’’ both reveals injustice and offers the promise of change. As such, the poem inspired black readers in Hughes’s day to anticipate the day when they too would join their brethren at the American table. For those who endorsed segregation, it issued a warning that they dare not resist this change. Source: Sheri Metzger Karmiol, Critical Essay on ‘‘I Too,’’ in Poetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2009.

Jeff Westover In the following excerpt, Westover analyzes Hughes’s struggle with national identity, as evidenced in such poems as ‘‘I, Too.’’ The concept of America is multifaceted in the work of Langston Hughes. In one respect, America’s political self-definitions provide the poet with the basis for challenging the status quo and

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THE POLITICAL INFLECTIONS OF HUGHES’ POETIC PERSONAE, THE COMMUNAL ‘I’ AND ‘WE’ THAT HE ARTICULATES IN VARIOUS WAYS, REVEAL THE CONFLICT AND INJUSTICES OF AMERICAN HISTORY.’’

demanding change from the government that supports it. As James Presley puts it, ‘‘for Hughes the American Dream . . . is the raison d’eˆtre of this nation’’ (380). When writing from this perspective, Hughes draws on the ideas behind the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, and the Bill of Rights in order to criticize racial injustice in both domestic and international arenas. Lloyd Brown makes this argument, writing that the majority culture’s dream of a progressive society based on individual fulfillment and social harmony . . . has created its own inevitable legacy—that is, the Black American Dream of realizing those dreams and ideals that have been written down for white folks. (17)

Brown develops this argument in the context of his discussion of ‘‘Harlem’’ and other ‘‘Dreampoems’’ by Hughes, but it applies to many others as well. In a similar vein, Donald B. Gibson writes that ‘‘Hughes’s commitment to the American ideal was deep . . . and abiding. He held on to it despite his acute awareness of the inequities of democracy, and he seemed to feel that in time justice would prevail, that the promises of the dream would be fulfilled. His early poem ‘‘I, Too’’ (The Weary Blues, 1926) is testimony to his faith’’ (45). Finally, as Anthony Dawahare argues, in ‘‘Let America Be America Again,’’ ‘‘the true ‘America’ of the future will embody Jeffersonian political ideals: it will be a nation of, by, and for ‘the people,’ based on the notion of inalienable rights, and free from tyranny’’ (34). From another perspective that Hughes also sometimes adopts, however, the United States is a place to be deeply criticized, if not rejected altogether. Hughes expresses his ambivalent attitudes toward his country through the repeated motifs of the Middle Passage, slavery, African American culture, and a diasporan ‘‘pan-Africanism.’’

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Hughes’ work reveals an ongoing conflict between Africa-centered and African-American ideals. As Adam Lively points out, this conflict reflects the immediate context of the period in which Hughes began to write. ‘‘The 1920s,’’ he observes, ‘‘saw the birth of the idea of blacks as the inside outsiders of modern life’’ (7). In line with this idea, the poet’s reflections on his country and its history are double-tongued, exemplifying the double consciousness W. E. B. Du Bois regarded as constitutive of African-American experience in general. As Raymond Smith puts it, Hughes ‘‘could affirm with equal assurance his two credos of identity: ‘I am a Negro’ and ‘I, Too, Sing America.’ But while affirming these polar commitments, Hughes was alienated from both of them. As a black man, he was aware that his race had never been granted full participation in the American dream’’ (270). The political inflections of Hughes’ poetic personae, the communal ‘‘I’’ and ‘‘we’’ that he articulates in various ways, reveal the conflict and injustices of American history. In this essay, I reflect upon the fact that Hughes’ poetic configurations of ‘‘I’’ and ‘‘we’’ sometimes also refer to a diasporan black community, rather than to the imagined community of the United States, a fact which indicates the complex nature of his national consciousness. In particular, I suggest that it is from his dual vantage as a U.S. citizen and a member of the African diaspora that Hughes criticizes the failures of American democracy and challenges the United States to live up to its founding dream of freedom. Paul Gilroy’s emphasis in The Black Atlantic on the concept of double consciousness provides the point of departure for my analysis of Hughes’ writing. Through his concept of a continuum of black culture on both sides of the Atlantic, he extends the idea of double consciousness to the entire African diaspora, arguing that modern blacks simultaneously live both inside and outside the West. For Gilroy, the promise of such dual existence lies in its dialectical potential, for along with the alienation attendant upon the forced displacements of slavery, this habitation in two worlds gives rise to a valuable new perspective: What was initially felt to be a curse—the curse of homelessness or the curse of forced exile— gets repossessed. It becomes affirmed and is reconstructed as the basis of a privileged standpoint from which certain useful and critical perceptions about the modern world become more likely. (111)

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Gilroy’s suggestive theorization of black modernity offers a model of double consciousness that points in the different directions of Africa and America at once. In addition, while he persuasively argues on behalf of the African diaspora as a paradigm for black cultural analysis, he also acknowledges the fictionality of such a model, recognizing the conflicts within its widely dispersed communities. This model is useful for understanding Hughes, whose poetry both evokes the African diaspora as a cultural ideal and registers the discrepancies between that ideal and the reality of diasporan disunity. Because Hughes defines the category of the national through recourse to the ideas of Africa and an African diaspora, I focus on his representations of Africa in order to show how they inform, and even constitute, his conceptions of the United States and his place within it. Africa is a necessary term in Hughes’ figurations of the nation, and conversely, the category of the nation mediates his relationship to Africa . . . . Hughes traveled to Africa as a young seaman in 1923 and gained some sense of its colonial domination and of his status as an outsider there. Hughes’ story of his encounter with Africans reflects his awareness of Marcus Garvey and his effort to ‘‘unify the black world, and free and exalt Africa’’ (Big Sea 102). In other words, he experienced his first direct contact with Africa within the context of a diasporan consciousness. In the first volume of his autobiography, The Big Sea, Hughes demonstrates the far from idyllic character of that initial interaction, as well as the discrepancy between, on the one hand, the vision that Garvey championed and, on the other, the disunity between black Africans and lighter skinned people of African descent: ‘‘Our problems in America are very much like yours,’’ I told the Africans, ‘‘especially in the South. I am a Negro, too.’’ But they only laughed at me and shook their heads and said: ‘‘You, white man! You, white man!’’ It was the only place in the world where I’ve ever been called a white man. They looked at my copper-brown skin and straight black hair—like my grandmother’s Indian hair, except a little curly—and they said: ‘‘You— white man.’’ (102–103)

Hughes goes on to point out that one of the Africans, a Kru from Liberia ‘‘who had seen

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many American Negroes, of various shades and colors, and knew much of America,’’ explained their response to him: ‘‘Here . . . on the West Coast, there are not many colored people—people of mixed blood—and those foreign colored men who are here come mostly as missionaries, to teach us something, since they think we know nothing. Or they come from the West Indies, as clerks and administrators in the colonial governments, to help carry out the white man’s laws. So the Africans call them all white men.’’ ‘‘But I am not white,’’ I said. ‘‘You are not black either,’’ the Kru man said simply. ‘‘There is a man of my color.’’ And he pointed to George, the pantryman, who protested loudly. ‘‘Don’t point at me,’’ George said. ‘‘I’m from Lexington, Kentucky, U.S.A. And no African blood, nowhere.’’ ‘‘You black,’’ said the Kru man. (The Big Sea 103)

As Rampersad hints, this and other stories of Hughes’ experiences in and offshore Africa reflect the poet’s concomitant desire for and alienation from it as his historic motherland. ‘‘That he would want to be considered black,’’ Rampersad writes, ‘‘struck the Africans as perverse, perhaps even subtle mockery. In vain he protested that he was not white’’ (1: 78). Hughes’ prose account of these interactions with Africans plainly shows the lack of unity between Africans and colored peoples of African descent, but his poems often work against this lack by asserting the reality of a unified African diaspora. This assertion is Hughes’ poetic effort to project an imagined community that is at once American and not-American. This metaphorical ‘‘dual citizenship’’ corresponds to Gilroy’s redefinition of Du Bois’s double consciousness as a uniquely black perspective on the nature of modernity (111). As Rampersad observes, the Africans’ rejection of Hughes as a fellow black ‘‘stirred [him] to assert the unity of blacks everywhere, as in his little poem ‘Brothers’: ‘We are related—you and I. / You from the West Indies, / I from Kentucky.’ And both were related to Africa.’’ Rampersad characterizes the contradictions between Hughes’ desire for Africa and his exclusion from it as ‘‘anxiety.’’ I am arguing that this anxiety has both a psychological and sociological dimension to it, and Hughes not only suffers from this anxiety but also sublimates it in the texts of many of his poems. According to Rampersad, for example, Hughes’ ‘‘anxiety over Africa also

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inspired’’ ‘‘My People,’’ which was first entitled ‘‘Poem’’ (1: 78): The night is beautiful So the faces of my people. The stars are beautiful, So the eyes of my people. Beautiful, also, is the sun. Beautiful, also, are the souls of my people. (Collected Poems 36) Rampersad’s characterization of Hughes’ feelings about Africa as ‘‘anxiety’’ points to the political and cultural disunity of the African diaspora at the time such poems were composed. Hughes’ relationship to the ‘‘we’’ this poem articulates is a vexed one, for it includes both yearning and alienation. The repeated invocation of ‘‘my people’’ in the poem has two contrasting aspects. On the one hand, the repetition attests to the ‘‘anxiety’’ Rampersad describes, for the poem’s insistence on the speaker’s membership in the ‘‘family of Africa’’—understated and gracious though it is—points to a lingering fear that the people of Africa are not really ‘‘his’’ at all. The poet’s desire for Africa reflects his corresponding alienation from the United States, which fails to function for him as a definitive homeland. As Kenneth W. Warren puts it, ‘‘To be cognizant of oneself as a diasporan subject is always to be aware of oneself no matter where one is, as from elsewhere, in the process of making a not quite legitimate appeal to be considered as if one were from there’’ (400–1). On the other hand, Hughes’ articulation of ‘‘my people’’ and a sometimes national, sometimes international ‘‘we’’ in a range of poems (including not only ‘‘My People’’ but also ‘‘Our Land,’’ ‘‘Afraid,’’ ‘‘Poem to a Dead Soldier,’’ ‘‘Fog,’’ ‘‘Prelude to Our Age,’’ ‘‘Children’s Rhymes,’’ and ‘‘A Ballad of Negro History’’) call that community into being, performing it into existence by constituting the poet’s audience as a common body. As a speech act, the poem imagines the diaspora as a viable community, celebrating it as a realistic as well as desirable goal. It presents an alternatively imagined community that offers a sense of belonging, heritage, and pride to African Americans in general. In contrast, in ‘‘AfroAmerican Fragment’’ Hughes variously evokes communities of black Americans through the plural pronouns we and us and through his remarks to a generalized you in such poems as ‘‘Black Dancers,’’ ‘‘How Thin a Blanket,’’ ‘‘Vagabonds,’’

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and possibly ‘‘Youth,’’ ‘‘Walkers with the Dawn,’’ and ‘‘Being Old.’’ Hughes’ autobiographical accounts of his reception in Africa and of his fellow seamen’s economic deception of native Africans show that his poems praising Africa as the symbol of black unity were deliberate fictions (The Big Sea 108– 109). His response may be read as a psychological compensation for the alienation from Africans he must have felt but carefully avoids recording in his autobiography. At the same time, however, the many poems that praise Africa or that imagine links between America and Africa may be interpreted in political terms as the expression of a utopian hope for genuine diasporan unity . . . . Source: Jeff Westover, ‘‘Fragmentation and Diaspora in the Work of Langston Hughes,’’ in Callaloo, Vol. 25, No. 4, Autumn 2002, pp. 1207–23.

Robert E. Hemenway In the following excerpt, Hemenway discusses the inspiration for Hughes’s poetry and his lack of early success as a writer. There is no more enigmatic figure in black letters than James Langston Hughes, despite his life-long effort to appear as simple and transparent as his famous urban philosopher, Jesse B. Semple. Hughes was both radical and conservative, open and closed, a man who constructed an adult personality blending innocent wonder at the world, studied passivity, a profound sense of personal privacy, and a single-minded commitment to a literary career. He was capable of complete sincerity while publishing willful autobiographical falsehoods. A writer who once threw away his books, he loved words, but refused to seek language for his most personal experiences. Hughes always remained something of a mystery, even to his closest friends. A private door lay just beneath the surface marked ‘‘DO NOT ENTER.’’ He retreated there often to fulfill his talent, but he never shared that interior apartment with others. A high school friend heard him read his poems and wrote Hughes: ‘‘I like you on that platform, that you which you had never shown us before. You wear a mask so that you can keep that you for work.’’ The best glimpse of this inner space may come not from poetry, but from psychosomatic illness—Hughes’s periodic physical breakdowns at moments of personal crisis. As revealing as

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THE UNHAPPINESS OF CHILDHOOD PRODUCED A RESERVOIR OF EMOTION THAT FLOWED FREELY TO HIS TALENT, WITH THE RESULT THAT HUGHES ACHIEVED SUCCESS AT A VERY YOUNG AGE.’’

these illnesses are, they only give shape to the offstage turmoil. His deepest emotions never reached center stage in anything other than symbolic form. Hughes was the most important black poet in the world for most of his life, primarily because at the same time he protected what was within, he could project himself into the feelings of others; his enormous empathy empowered him to articulate people’s emotions, especially those inarticulate in the heroism of survival. As Arnold Rampersad authoritatively argues, in this first volume of a two volume biography, Hughes redefined the standards for poetry and prose written by black authors. He became a revered, almost saintly figure, helpful to young writers, patient and generous to a fault, willing to give his name to any cause which would help the race. Rampersad believes that one source of Hughes’s inspiration was a sense of humility, a feeling that his own art was inferior to the collective artistry of black religion and black music. Having lived much of his early life ‘‘outside the culture he worshipped,’’ Hughes regretted that ‘‘so much of his life had been spent away from consistent, normal involvement with the black masses whose affection and regard he craved.’’ . . . Hughes had an unhappy childhood, povertystricken and virtually abandoned by both his parents, and some of Rampersad’s best insights into the private Hughes grow from his imaginative recreation of that boyhood. From his first sentence (written with a stylistic grace characteristic of the entire volume)—‘‘In some respects he grew up a motherless and a fatherless child, who never forgot the hurts of his childhood’’—Rampersad brings light to what Hughes held tightly within. Rampersad sees Hughes with ‘‘an unappeased hunger’’ for affection that led to a ‘‘chronic unwillingness to

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vent anger,’’ a ‘‘fundamental urge . . . toward passivity,’’ and a ‘‘practiced humility.’’ The unhappiness of childhood produced a reservoir of emotion that flowed freely to his talent, with the result that Hughes achieved success at a very young age. Rampersad reminds us of just how many ‘‘great’’ Hughes poems— those canonized for decades, such as ‘‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers,’’ or ‘‘Mother To Son’’—were written while he was still a teenager. These poems were widely published in the black community, but it wasn’t until the Harlem Renaissance that Hughes attracted notice in the white world as well. Eighteen days after Carl Van Vechten offered to help Hughes place his poetry, The Weary Blues was accepted by Knopf. Hughes was 23 years old, only months away from enrolling as a college freshman. That so much of Hughes’s best poetry was inspired by the hurts of his youth lends credence to Rampersad’s assertion that ‘‘Langston understood that he needed to be unhappy to write good verse.’’ Rampersad uses this thought as a motif. In 1935, Hughes sought to rejuvenate his verse. Rampersad speculates that ‘‘he also knew from bitter experience what he had to do immediately. He needed to retreat; he also needed to feel, like broken bones in his flesh, the twinned pains of isolation and poverty, the forces that shaped his life and his art.’’ I believe Rampersad is correct in this analysis, but some might argue that it is a romantic view of the poet. Certainly the notion that poverty was his inspiration was an idea Hughes resisted. He grew increasingly frustrated by his poverty, and spent most of his life trying to achieve a financial success. One of Rampersad’s most revealing reports is the jealousy that Hughes, the ‘‘Dean’’ of Afro-American letters, felt about the royalties which rolled in following Native Son’s selection as a Book of the Month. What is admirable here is that Rampersad can see through Hughes’s often expressed desire to make money as a writer. Behind that private door, Hughes really did see himself as a romantic figure, a lonely poet who transcended material needs. For example, roaming the Soviet Union as a solitary wanderer, Hughes saw himself fulfilling a romantic vision: ‘‘Most of my life from childhood on has been spent moving, traveling, changing places, knowing people in one school, in one town or in one group, or on one ship a little while, but soon never seeing most of them again.’’

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Whatever the ambivalence of his hopes, Hughes’s public career had a lack of commercial success. His second volume, Fine Clothes to the Jew, was a better collection, but a commercial failure, partly because of its title. All the Hughes books published prior to 1941 were commercial failures, despite his talent for self-publicity, willingness to personally market them, and a generally positive critical reception. One of the reasons may be Hughes’s desire to market his books in the black community at a time when the economy was not structured to support such a market. The one public aspect of Hughes’s career which Rampersad leaves for future scholars is the phenomenon of Langston Hughes as a poet, the commodity that his work became. By the 1930s, Hughes had achieved a different kind of public fame as a radical, a vociferous voice in defense of the Scottsboro Boys, a communist sympathizer who was active in the John Reed Club and president of the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, an organization supported by the American Communist Party. He spent a year in Russia praising the Bolshevik Revolution for its lack of racial prejudice, and wrote a number of poems that he would later try to excuse, if not repudiate. One of them, ‘‘Good Bye Christ,’’ would lead to the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson breaking up a book signing party for The Big Sea a decade after the poem was written. Rampersad makes the argument that Hughes’s career as a radical probably diminished his talent, and it seems an assertion supported by the quality of Hughes’s work in the thirties, even if one avoids the label, ‘‘proletarian doggerel,’’ that his biographer applies to some of his efforts. The conclusion I draw is that Hughes’s radicalism was always a bit superficial, tied to the Left’s support for black equality, and grounded in Hughes’s love for humanity, particularly for the underdog. One might like to know more about the intellectual rationale, the ideology for his leftist politics, but Hughes was not about to supply it. He had a hatred of injustice and an instinctive identification with the proletariat, but he avoided Marxism as an intellectual regimen. Rampersad reports Hughes’s own words, written after the German-Soviet Non-aggression Pact and the end of the Spanish Civil War, suggesting that radical poetry may have been only a career path: ‘‘To Noel Sullivan, Hughes presented himself, in a remarkable confession, as

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using his influence with the left only to ease his way through the Depression. Since poverty seemed to be his lot, ‘the only thing I can do is to string along with the Left until maybe someday all of us poor folks will get enough to eat, including rent, gas, light and water.’’’ Rampersad generally emphasizes the public Hughes of the radical years, both because Hughes did not communicate his ideology, and also because he acted out his political instincts. Rampersad describes Hughes’s presidency of the League of Struggle for Negro Rights—‘‘improbably, Hughes at some point became president of the league’’— but Hughes left no evidence which would describe the intellectual commitments that led to such a position. Rampersad’s belief is that Hughes’s politics were based on human beings in need rather than a dialectical sense of history; it is a conclusion supported by Hughes’s life long suspicion of intellectual solutions to human problems. The ideological underpinnings of such a poem as ‘‘Put one more ‘s’ in the USA / and make it Soviet,’’ did not play a large part in Hughes’s life. He was not comfortable with abstract ideas (Alberta Bontemps claimed he almost never read a book), and although clearly something in Leftist ideology struck a deep chord in the private self, his public actions were seldom given an intellectual defense. It may have been that the Left offered a version of the collectivity, the sense of community, that Hughes saw in black religion and music . . . . Source: Robert E. Hemenway, ‘‘Most Public of Poets, Most Private of Men,’’ in Callaloo, No. 36, Summer 1988, pp. 636–42.

John W. Parker In the following essay, Parker discusses Hughes’s hope for an egalitarian American future in his poem ‘‘I, Too.’’ Carl Van Vechten once referred to Langston Hughes as the ‘‘Negro Poet Laureate,’’ and in his introduction to the young poet’s first book of poems, The Weary Blues, confessed that he could recall no other person whatsoever who, at the age of twenty-three, had enjoyed so picturesque and so rambling an experience. Hughes’s facility in interpreting feelingly and understandingly to themselves and to others the emotional heights and depths of the Negro people has increasingly lengthened his shadow as a man of letters and fastened him unmistakably upon the

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HUGHES HAS STORED NO HATE IN HIS SOUL, NOR HAS HE DESCENDED TO THE LEVEL OF THE PROPAGANDIST.’’

popular imagination of the American people. Since the publication in 1921 of the poem ‘‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers,’’ his first selection to attract wide attention, Hughes has succeeded as poet, fictionist, essayist, dramatist, and lecturer; and many of his poems and some of his articles and stories have been translated into German, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and Dutch. Hughes made his appearance upon the literary scene amid the developments which followed in the wake of World War I and witnessed the impact of the depression upon American life and letters. One result of the war was that many Negroes whose experiences had been limited to their own back yards were suddenly snatched up and transported to foreign shores where they witnessed new modes of thinking and of living; and many others left behind straightway forsook the southern cotton fields for the industrial centers of the North and West. To the complex urban problems encountered, many fell prey as flies that seek out the beautiful only to find sure death. A corresponding change in Negro literature dates from around the 1920’s, when a movement popularly known as the ‘‘Negro Literary Renaissance’’ got under way; for one thing, it amounted to a new awakening on the part of the younger Negro writers themselves; for another, a greater spirit of acceptance on the part of the American whites. Langston Hughes became perhaps the most representative exponent of the new spirit in Negro literature. Three themes have for the most part engaged Hughes’s attention: the primitivistic naturalism of the Harlem dweller, the propagandistic leftwing writing in support of a more articulate proletarian group, and the literature of protest against the social and economic maladjustments of the Negro people. That Harlem should have been the basis of much that Hughes wrote may be

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explained by the fact that, far more than any other single spot, here were the foreign-born blacks, the carefree Negro from the South, the disappointed Negro veteran back from the war, in fact, the ‘‘melting pot’’ of Negro culture. Life, at least much of it, was characterized by a spirit of abandon, and it was this emphasis upon the hectic, the coarse, and the sensational that brought Hughes in for many a critical lashing. When in his Shakespeare in Harlem, Hughes returned to the Harlem theme, Owen Dodson charged that he was ‘‘backing into the future looking at the past.’’ The emphasis of the Negro renaissance came to an end with the change of the decade, and during the years immediately following Hughes devoted much of his effort to a rapidly expanding proletarian movement as is evidenced by such selections as The Ways of White Folks (1934), A New Song (1938), and Front Porch (1939). Likewise, the self-conscious revolt against the American scheme of things is a theme to which the poet recurs. Color prejudice, segregation and discrimination, in fact, the totality of the black man’s marginal existence in American life is implied in four lines from Fields of Wonder: Four walls can shelter So much sorrow, Garnered from yesterday And held for tomorrow! The events of the past two decades have been accompanied by a depressing sense of futility and a loss of faith. Security has seemed nowhere. Today’s youth have seen more struggle and chaos and groping in the darkness than any generation of youth in the entire span of our national history. Nor has Hughes escaped the impact of this upheaval; but, while he has been pre-eminently a man of the present, he has maintained a healthful view of the future. The night and the gloom and the darkness have offered a challenge, but never disillusionment. Being walkers with the dawn and morning, Walkers with the sun and morning, We are not afraid of the night, Nor days of gloom, Nor darkness— Being walkers with the sun and morning. But Hughes’s view of a new day for his people, somehow inevitable in the nature and in the trend of things, is not always a clear one; frequently it is beclouded by a ‘‘weariness that bows me down,’’ a ‘‘dream that is vague and all confused.’’ Recalling the injured pride and the

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pent-up emotions of the porter at the railroad station, Hughes asks defiantly, Must I say Yes, Sir To you all the time. Yes, Sir! Yes, Sir! All my days? Doors closed permanently, and hence a meaninglessness to the black man’s striving is the definition of the situation in which Jamie sits on a hill Looking out to sea Toward a mirage-land That will never be. Loss of faith, however, is a temporary condition. Before long the poet regains perspective and sees, if but imperfectly, the new order being carved out of the old. In ‘‘Park Bench,’’ as in ‘‘Porter,’’ he continues in the vein of the ‘‘Crusader,’’ as Verna Anery once labeled him; for here he makes a savage thrust at the wealthy class on Park Avenue and offers a sober warning that the new awakening which is settling upon the Negro people may subsequently find expression in a change of the mores: But I’m wakin’ up! Say ain’t you afraid That I might, just maybe, In a year or two Move on over To Park Avenue? Although he writes mainly concerning his own people, Hughes has proceeded on the sound assumption that the so-called Negro problem is not an isolated one but a single segment of a complex American culture. Color prejudice moves hand in hand with race prejudice and religious prejudice, and, despite the artificial line that divides them, humble folk of all races face a common lot; their children in the swamps of Mississippi as in the orange groves of California, weary and disillusioned, march toward a common destiny. ‘‘The Kids Who Die,’’ to which a Darwinian note attaches, is disarmingly forthright: But the day will come— You are sure yourself that it is coming— When the marching feet of the masses Will raise for a monument of love, And joy, and laughter, And black hands and white hands clasped as one

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And a song that reaches the sky— The song of the new life triumphant Through the Kids that die! Complete assurance that ‘‘America will be’’ and that black and white will some day look neither up nor down but across at each other is implicit in lines from the poem ‘‘I, Too’’: Tomorrow, I’ll [be] at the table When company comes. Nobody’ll dare Say to me ‘‘Eat in the Kitchen’’ Then. Although increasingly, as Fields of Wonder reveals, Langston Hughes has written on a variety of topics, it is true that in the main he has followed the course of the ‘‘social poet’’; he has been concerned not so much with moonlight and roses, sweetness and light, as with ‘‘whole groups of people’s problems’’—poverty, the ghetto, trade-unions, color lines, and Georgia lynchings. But, like Chesnutt, Hughes has stored no hate in his soul, nor has he descended to the level of the propagandist. His healthy view of the tomorrows yet to be is an outgrowth of his faith in the essential goodness of the human heart and hence the ultimate flowering of the democratic way of life in America.

Cotter, James Finn, ‘‘The Truth of Poetry,’’ in the Hudson Review, Vol. 44, No. 2, Summer 1991, pp. 343–48, 350–51.

Source: John W. Parker, ‘‘‘Tomorrow’ in the Writings of Langston Hughes,’’ in College English, Vol. 10, No. 8, May 1949, pp. 438–41.

‘‘The Liberia Plan,’’ in AfricaWithin.com, http://www. africawithin.com/garvey/liberia_plan.htm (accessed July 17, 2008).

SOURCES ‘‘African American Timeline: From Africa to Harlem,’’ Web site of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, http://artsedge.kennedy-center.org/content/ 2247/2247_migration_timeline.pdf (accessed July 17, 2008). Blake, Robert W., ‘‘Poets on Poetry: Writing and the Reconstruction of Reality,’’ in English Journal, Vol. 79, No. 7, November 1990, pp. 16–21. Campbell, Donna, ‘‘Brief Timeline of American Literature and Events, 1920-1929,’’ http://www.wsu.edu/camp belld/ amlit/1920.htm (accessed July 21, 2008). ‘‘Constitution and By-Laws of the UNIA-ACL,’’ Official Web site of the UNIA-ACL, http://www.unia-acl.org/ (accessed July 17, 2008). Corbett, Sue, ‘‘Langston Hughes: The Gentle Giant of the Harlem Renaissance,’’ in Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service, February 13, 2002, p. K4900.

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Davis, Ronald, ‘‘From Terror to Triumph: Historical Overview,’’ in History of Jim Crow, http://www.jimcrowhistory. org/history/history.htm (accessed June 27, 2008). ‘‘Donald v. United Clans of America,’’ in Southern Poverty Law Center, http://www.splcenter.org/legal/docket/ files.jsp?cdrID=10 (accessed September 3, 2008). F. B. B., Review of The Weary Blues, in Langston Hughes: The Contemporary Reviews, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 71; originally published in the Boston Transcript, May 15, 1926. Gossen, Stephen, Schoole of Abuse, Renascence Editions, http://www.uoregon.edu/rbear/gosson1.html (accessed July 20, 2008). Harmon, William, and Holman, Hugh, A Handbook to Literature, 11th ed., Prentice Hall, 2008, pp. 340–341. Heyward, Du Bose, Review of The Weary Blues, in Langston Hughes: The Contemporary Reviews, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 74–75; originally published in New York Herald Tribune Books, August 1, 1926. Howard, Natasha, ‘‘Black Identities in the 21st Century,’’ http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_ citation/1/1/6/5/8/p116587_index.html (accessed July 7, 2008). Hughes, Langston, ‘‘I, Too,’’ in Langston Hughes: Poems, edited by David Roessel, Alfred A. Knopf, 1999, p. 35. Kinzer, Stephen, ‘‘For a Poet, Centennial Appreciation,’’ in the New York Times, February 14, 2002, p. B1.

Library of Congress, ‘‘Timeline of African American History, 1901–1925’’ in American Memory: African American Perspectives, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aap/timelin3. html (accessed July 17,2008). Locke, Alain, ‘‘Enter the New Negro,’’ in Survey Graphic, Vol. 6, No. 6, March 1925, pp. 631–34, http://etext.virginia. edu/harlem/contents.html (accessed July 21, 2008). ———, ‘‘Harlem,’’ in Survey Graphic, Vol. 6, No. 6, March 1925, pp. 628–630, http://etext.virginia.edu/harlem/contents. html (accessed July 21, 2008). ‘‘Locke and the New Negro,’’ in Renaissance Collage, http:// xroads.virginia.edu/MA03/faturoti/harlem/collage/locke. html (accessed July 17, 2008). Marvell, Andrew, ‘‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland,’’ in Andrew Marvell, edited by Frank Kermode and Keith Walker, Oxford University Press, 1990, pp. 82–83. McCune, Marianne, ‘‘Harlem Renaissance,’’ in the Savvy Traveler Web site, http://savvytraveler.publicradio.org/ show/features/1999/19990220/harlem.shtml (accessed July 7, 2008).

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Meaux, Corinne, Review of The Weary Blues, in Langston Hughes: The Contemporary Reviews, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 52; originally published in the New York Amsterdam News, January 27, 1926.

artists and authors who depict black life. The author is particularly interested in African American folk culture and its effect on black identity.

Milloy, Courtland, ‘‘Hate is Always in Style at a Gathering of the Klan,’’ in the Washington Post, October 18, 2006, p. B01.

Franklin, John Hope, and Alfred A. Moss, Jr., From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, 8th ed., Knopf, 2000. This book provides a comprehensive and easyto-access history of African Americans from their lives in Africa, through slavery in the United States, and to life after slavery. The authors discuss discrimination in housing, education, and employment, as well as the contributions made by black Americans during war.

‘‘NC Domestic Terrorism Brief,’’ in PoliceLink, http:// www.policelink.com/training/articles/29086-nc-domesticterrorism-brief (accessed September 3, 2008). Peiter, Ruth, Review of The Weary Blues, in Langston Hughes: The Contemporary Reviews, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 50; originally published in the Toledo Times, n.d. ‘‘Question of the Month: Timeline of African American History,’’ Web site of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/question/ oct04/ (accessed July 17, 2008). ‘‘Race Riots, Lynching, and Other Forms of Racism in the 1920s,’’ in E Pluribus Unum: America in the 1170s, 1850s, and 1920s, http://www.assumption.edu/ahc/racer iots/default.html (accessed July 21, 2008). Rampersad, Arnold, The Life of Langston Hughes: I, Too, Sing America, Vol. I: 1902–1941, Oxford University Press, 1986, pp. 94–95. Schauble, Virginia M., ‘‘Reading American Modernist Poetry with High-School Seniors,’’ in English Journal, Vol. 81, No. 1, January 1992, pp. 50–53. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, A Defense of Poetry, in Critical Theory Since Plato, edited by Hazard Adams, Harcourt Barce Jovanocich, 1971, pp. 500–13. Sidney, Sir Philip, Defence of Poesy, Ginn, 1898, pp. 49–52. Thomas-Lester, Avis, ‘‘A Senate Apology for History on Lynching,’’ in the Washington Post, June 14, 2005, p. A12. Tolnay, Stewart E., and E. M. Beck, ‘‘Racial Violence and Black Migration in the American South, 1910– 1930,’’ in the American Sociological Review, Vol. 57, 1992, pp. 103–16. Trotman, C. James, ed., Langston Hughes: The Man, His Art, and His Continuing Influence, Garland Publishing, 1995, p. 29. Whitman, Walt, ‘‘I Hear America Singing,’’ in Leaves of Grass, Signet/Penguin, 1980, p. 38.

FURTHER READING Favor, J. Martin, Authentic Blackness: The Folk in the New Negro Renaissance, Duke University Press, 1999. This book examines social class and status and how the diversity of black life is defined by the

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Morrison, Toni, ed., Race-ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality, Pantheon, 1992. Morrison edited and wrote the introduction to this text, which is a collection of nineteen essays that deal with several aspects of African American identity, civil rights, equality, and the public perception of race and gender equality. These essays explore important ideas about equality for black men and women, as well as illustrate that race and equality in the United States remain complex issues for discussion. Powell, Richard J., Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance, University of California Press, 1997. This illustrated book includes a collection of essays that examine the life and work of the actors, artists, musicians, and authors whose work is identified as originating from the Harlem Renaissance. Ritterhouse, Jennifer, Growing Up Jim Crow: The Racial Socialization of Black and White Southern Children, 1890–1940, University of North Carolina Press, 2006. The author explores how children learned the unwritten and carefully socialized rules of segregation. It also explores how the differences between public and private behaviors were defined during this period of American history. Sniderman, Paul M., and Thomas Piazza, Black Pride and Black Prejudice, Princeton University Press, 2004. This book provides a provocative look at race relations in the United States. The focus is on how African Americans view themselves and how they perceive themselves in the eyes of others. Some of the topics covered include black pride, black intolerance, and racism. West, Cornell, Race Matters, Vintage, 1994. This text is a collection of West’s essays exploring a number of issues that are important to many African Americans, including affirmative action, black leadership, and the legacy of civil rights activist Malcolm X.

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A Nocturnal Reverie ANNE FINCH 1713

During her lifetime, Anne Finch received limited recognition as a poet, despite the care she took with her writing. She was an aristocrat and a woman, therefore few took her work seriously. In the twentieth century, Finch’s work was rediscovered and appreciated. Written in 1713, Finch’s ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie’’ is among the works that has garnered serious critical attention for the poet. Characteristically Augustan in style and content, the poem contains classical references and descriptions of nature (particularly flowers and the moon) that are consistent with the English Augustan Age. Some consider the poem to be a precursor to the romantic movement. This position is supported by the fact that William Wordsworth, one of the fathers of romantic literature in English, referenced Finch’s poem in the supplement to the preface of the second edition of his famous collection Lyrical Ballads (1815), coauthored with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The poem is serene in tone and rich in imagery. Finch creates a natural scene that is inviting and relaxing—a nighttime wonderland that, unfortunately, must be left as daybreak approaches. The speaker is saddened that dawn is coming and she must return to the harsh reality of the world and the day. This poem remains one of Finch’s best-loved and most-anthologized works. It appears in 2003’s Anne Finch: Countess of Winchilsea: Selected Poems, edited by Denys Thompson.

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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, was born in April 1661 to Anne Haselwood and Sir William Kingsmill. Finch was their third child, and would be their last, as William died when Finch was only five months old. Fortunately, William made arrangements for all of his children’s educations before his death. After her mother was remarried to Sir Thomas Ogle in 1662, the couple had a daughter named Dorothy who was a close sister and lifelong friend to Finch. Anne died, leaving Thomas with the formidable task of rearing four young children alone. All were under seven years old at the time. Finch was a member of Charles II’s court at the age of twenty-one, when she became a maid of honor to Mary of Modena, wife of the Duke of York. There she befriended other young women with literary interests, and Finch began to dabble in poetry. She also met Colonel Heneage Finch, a soldier and courtier appointed as Groom of the Bedchamber to the Duke of York. The Colonel courted the young maid until she agreed to marry him in 1684 and leave her position in the court. By all accounts, the marriage was happy for both of them. He continued to work in government affairs, and they first lived in Westminster before moving to London when Colonel Finch became increasingly involved with work duties upon the accession of King James II in 1685. The Finches’ support of James and their Stuart sympathies cost Colonel Finch his position when James was deposed in 1688. Because Colonel Finch refused to compromise his beliefs and give his support to William and Mary, he had difficulty finding a new job. Colonel Finch’s nephew encouraged the couple to live on the family estate in Eastwell, where they spent the next twenty-five years. The Colonel became the Earl of Winchilsea in 1712. Through the ups and downs of her early years in marriage, Finch’s interest in writing did not wane. Taking the pseudonym ‘‘Ardelia,’’ she wrote poetry about her husband, whom she loved and honored. A tendency to express personal feelings in her poetry would continue as she matured in her writing; her poetry became a sort of diary through which she related personal experiences, feelings, religious convictions, and observations about the world around her. At the same time, her work reflects knowledge of and respect for seventeenth-century poetry and the conventions that characterize it. Biblical allusions, or references, appear in her work, as

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do metaphysical tendencies in imagery and verse that combines the spiritual and the logical. Fables became a sizeable part of her writing, comprising nearly one-third of her total work. Still, it has been poems such as ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie’’ and ‘‘The Spleen’’ that have kept Finch’s work in the canon of English literature of interest to scholars. Because of her early position in the court and her husband’s political career, Finch retained an interest in the throne, religion, and the politics of the day. Her early poetry reflects on the days she spent in court and how much she enjoys those memories; her later poetry reveals a mature understanding of the gravity of the politics surrounding the throne, and the seriousness of taking a stand for one’s loyalties. Although some of Finch’s work was published beginning in 1701, it was not until the appearance of her 1713 collection Miscellany Poems that she began to enjoy limited recognition by her contemporaries. To most, the idea of a woman writing serious poetry was still a bit farfetched. It was not until the twentieth century that her work began to receive much critical attention. A modern edition of her work was published in 1903, and various poems appear in major anthologies and studies of women’s writing. After enduring failing health for a number of years, Finch died on August 5, 1720. She was buried in Eastwell. At her funeral, her husband honored her memory by expressing to those in attendance how much he admired her faith, her loyalty, her friendship and support, and her writing.

POEM TEXT In such a night, when every louder wind Is to its distant cavern safe confined; And only gentle Zephyr fans his wings, And lonely Philomel, still waking, sings; Or from some tree, famed for the owl’s delight, She, hollowing clear, directs the wanderer right; In such a night, when passing clouds give place, Or thinly veil the heavens’ mysterious face; When in some river, overhung with green, The waving moon and trembling leaves are seen; When freshened grass now bears itself upright, And makes cool banks to pleasing rest invite, Whence springs the woodbind and the bramble-rose, And where the sleepy cowslip sheltered grows;

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Whilst now a paler hue the foxglove takes, Yet checkers still with red the dusky brakes; When scattered glow-worms, but in twilight fine, Show trivial beauties watch their hour to shine; Whilst Salisbury stands the test of every light, In perfect charms, and perfect virtue bright; When odors, which declined repelling day, Through temperate air uninterrupted stray; When darkened groves their softest shadows wear, And falling waters we distinctly hear; When through the gloom more venerable shows Some ancient fabric, awful in repose, While sunburnt hills their swarthy looks conceal, And swelling haycocks thicken up the vale: When the loosed horse now, as his pasture leads, Comes slowly grazing through the adjoining meads, Whose stealing pace and lengthened shade we fear, Till torn-up foliage in his teeth we hear: When nibbling sheep at large pursue their food, And unmolested kine rechew the cud; When curlews cry beneath the village walls, And to her straggling brood the partridge calls; Their shortlived jubilee the creatures keep, Which but endures, whilst tyrant man does sleep; When a sedate content the spirit feels, And no fierce light disturbs, whilst it reveals; But silent musings urge the mind to seek Something, too high for syllables to speak; Till the free soul to a composedness charmed, Finding the elements of rage disarmed, O’er all below a solemn quiet grown, Joys in the inferior world, and thinks it like her own: In such a night let me abroad remain Till morning breaks, and all’s confused again; Our cares, our toils, our clamors are renewed, Or pleasures, seldom reached, again pursued.

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in William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. It becomes a sort of refrain that pulls the reader through the poem. The speaker describes a night in which all harsh winds are far away, and the gentle breeze of Zephyr, Greek god of the west wind, is soothing. The other winds are characterized as louder; therefore, the speaker is subtly making a comparison. She does this in other ways throughout the poem, contrasting the near-perfection of her surroundings with other, lesser settings. It communicates the idea that she is in the most perfect place on earth. The song of a nightingale (Philomel) is heard, along with the sound of an owl. Both sounds are inviting and cheerful. Bird sounds at night are familiar and something to which the reader can readily relate. This makes it easier for the reader to surrender to the imagery of the poem. More birds will enter the sense imagery of the poem, but not until near the end.

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Clouds pass gently overhead, at times allowing the sky to shine through to the speaker. The distant night sky is depicted as enigmatic and elusive. There is a river with large trees hanging their leaves over it, and as it flows, its surface reflects the leaves and the moon. The reflections have movement, which simultaneously brings the moon and the leaves to life while also reminding the reader of the aforementioned breeze. The leaves shake partly because of the flow of the river, but also because the leaves themselves are moving with the wind.

Lines 11–15

‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie’’ is a fifty-line poem describing an inviting nighttime scene and the speaker’s disappointment when dawn brings it to an end, forcing her back to the real world. It is written in iambic pentameter, a meter that consists of five feet (or units), each containing an unstressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable. Moreover, it is written in heroic couplets—two lines of rhyming verse in iambic pentameter, usually self-contained so that the meaning of the two lines is complete without relying on lines before or after them.

Fresh grass stands strong and upright, suggesting that this poem takes place during spring. The grass seems to be freshly grown and maybe even recently rained upon. The grass invites the speaker to rest in it on the banks of the river. Various plants and flowers, including woodbind, bramble-rose, cowslip, and foxglove, grow there. The speaker describes the plants and flowers as not only being colorful but also as almost having personalities and interactions with one another. The images of the trees, the descriptions of overgrown foliage, and the mention of flowers being sheltered indicates that this is a shady area during the day, meaning it is especially cozy at night.

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Lines 16–20

The poem’s opening phrase is repeated three times over the course of the poem, and originates

The speaker then notices that glowworms have appeared during the twilight hour, and she

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comments that their beauty can only last a limited time because they rely on the dark to show their light. The speaker then mentions a lady named Salisbury (who is believed to have been a friend’s daughter), whose beauty and virtue are superior to the glowworms because they hold up in any light.

Lines 21–25 The speaker’s senses next pick up certain aromas that are not present during the day but only waft through the night air. It is as if they were waiting for just the right air for their arrival. Again, Finch enlivens nature through personification. She describes groves that, with little light, are softened with the near absence of shadow. In the distance, she hears a waterfall.

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the charm and joy of nature in such a way that her very soul is engaged.

Lines 46–50 As the poem draws to a close, the speaker longs to stay in the nighttime world of nature until morning comes and forces her back into her world of confusion. In the daytime, in man’s world, there are the worries of everyday life, the complications of living in society, work that must be done, and sounds that are not relaxing; however, she adds that people continue their pursuit of pleasure in the day. Because the poem’s title refers to a reverie, the reader is left wondering if the entire experience was a dream, or if her musings on the river bank were the dreamy state to which it refers.

Lines 26–30 A large edifice seems menacing in the darkened setting, and unshaded hills are hidden. In a field, there are haystacks and a horse grazing.

Lines 31–35 The horse’s slow pace across the field seems sneaky and his large shadow frightening, until the sound of his eating grass sets the speaker at ease. She suggests that the darkness sometimes makes people fearful of what they cannot see, but once she recognizes it is only a horse, her fear vanishes. She next mentions sheep grazing and cows chewing their cud without being bothered by anyone at all, and then she turns her attention to what the birds are doing. She hears the curlews.

Lines 36–40 The partridge calls out for her young. All of this sound she considers celebratory noise carrying on while men sleep; at night, nature is free of man’s rules and domination. She also remarks that the nighttime celebration does not last long. The speaker contemplates the relaxation and contentment of the setting, which is free of strong and piercing light.

Lines 41–45 The speaker describes how the scene inspires silent, peaceful musings about profound things that are hard to put into words. In fact, according to the speaker, it is impossible in such a setting for a person to hold onto anger. The serenity and seriousness of her spirit embraces

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THEMES Natural World versus Civilized World The speaker evokes a strong sense of serenity and escape in ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie.’’ The speaker has left her ordinary life behind in favor of exploring the inviting and relaxing nighttime landscape. Everything from the sights, sounds, and smells of the night creates an almost perfect world that comforts her and allows her the luxury of going deeply into her own thoughts and feelings. At no point does she feel lonely or hurried because nature in the twilight provides everything her real self—her spiritual self— needs. In contrast, the world of her day-lit society is depicted as restrictive and overpowering. It lacks all the peace and sensitivity of the natural setting she enjoys at night. Although Finch’s fifty lines only contain four that refer to the civilized world, they are enough to demonstrate the sharp contrast at the heart of ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie.’’ In line 38, men are described as tyrannical beings. When they sleep is when nature can enjoy its celebratory expression. The implication is that when man is awake and moving through the world, nature’s full glory is suppressed. It also implies that man really has no idea how alive nature is when he is out of the way. Toward the end of the poem, the speaker longs to remain in the nighttime setting. She resists returning to her everyday world of worrying and working. The pleasures of that world, she feels, are pursued but rarely reached.

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TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie’’ is rich in imagery and sensory descriptions. Find three to five works of art that, when combined, give a sense of the poem’s setting. Create a display that features the artwork and the poem. If you can find nature sounds that are consistent with the poem, add those for a multimedia experience.  The speaker lovingly embraces the serenity of nature at night. How does being outside at night make you feel? Drawing on your personal experiences, write a poem or a prose piece expressing your thoughts and feelings in such a different set of surroundings. The speaker prefers this setting to that of her everyday life. Which setting do you prefer?  Some scholars claim that this poem was a pre-romantic poem. Read about the romantic movement in England to find out what the writers were trying to accomplish and what the poetry of the movement was like. Who were the major poets of the time? Read at least five romantic poems and write an essay examining how Finch’s poem is like or unlike the other romantic poems you have selected. 



Finch was hindered in seriously pursuing poetry by her society and her status in it. Who were some of the first prominent women poets in England? What were their backgrounds and what subjects did they choose for their work? Create a digital ‘‘Hall of Fame’’ (in the form of a Web site or multimedia slideshow) presenting your findings in writing and in images.

Nature as Living Community Finch portrays nature in ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie’’ as a lively and animated community of animals, trees, flowers, plants, clouds, aromas, grass, wind, and water. These elements of nature are described as if they have feelings, opinions, and joy. The wind is not merely a lucky turn of the

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weather, but an act by the Greek god of the west wind himself. The owl sounds in the night for the purpose of leading the speaker to the right place. Clouds do not randomly float across the sky but act to hide and reveal the mysterious night sky. Grass stands tall of its own accord. The cowslip is sleepy, and the foxglove goes pale. Glowworms seize the right moment to show off their light, knowing that they can only do so for a limited time. Odors intentionally wait until evening to come out, when the air is more suitable. An edifice is both venerable and resting, and hills have expressions hidden by the night. The entire scene is a jubilee, a group celebration shared by the elements of nature and witnessed by the speaker. In the poem, nature is active instead of passive, and relational instead of merely existing. In short, the speaker brings nature to life in the same way that describing a person makes him or her seem like a real person to those who do not know him or her. The message behind this approach is that nature is alive and has much more to offer than aesthetic value. Finch is suggesting that nature can teach and minister to people wise enough to submit to it.

Escape The poem’s title bears the word reverie which is a dream or dream-like state. The poem is so rich, lavish, and utterly inviting, the reader must wonder if the speaker is describing a dream she had just before she awoke in the morning, or if she actually wandered through nature at night and, in her relaxation, fell into a dreamlike state. After all, as she rests on the riverbank, she describes thinking about things that are hard to put into words, and she admits the experience of being in that setting is spiritual. Either way, the appeal of the nocturnal setting she describes is that it affords her the opportunity to escape completely her humdrum daytime life. At the end of the poem, she describes the day as a time of confusion, work, and worry. She longs to stay in her reverie because it is an escape, real or imagined, from the life that makes her feel oppressed.

STYLE Syntax This poem is one continuous telling of the speaker’s experience; it tells a story in a clear path from the beginning to the end. Although it is fifty lines long, there is no period until the very end. Still,

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Owl perching on a tree branch (Ó moodboard / Corbis)

Finch’s command of the verse is steady throughout the poem and it never feels out of control or rambling. In fact, Finch controls the poem so carefully that all of the dreamy language and imaginative scenes are expressed in heroic couplets from start to finish. The effect of the ongoing punctuation is that the poem reads like a natural flow of thought as the speaker experiences the nighttime setting and allows her feelings to respond. It also propels the poem forward; as there are no hard breaks brought on by periods, other punctuation such as colons, commas, and semicolons instead serve to show the reader how one thought or image leads to the next. By the time the reader gets to line 39, in which the speaker describes her relaxed spirit surrendering to high-level spiritual thoughts, the reader is already accustomed to an almost stream-of-consciousness feel. Like the speaker, the reader experiences the flow and relaxation of the nighttime setting.

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Personification Using personification, Finch breathes life into the natural elements in ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie’’ so thoroughly that the scene seems populated with friends, old and new, rather than with trees, animals, and breezes. Every element that the speaker encounters in her nighttime adventure is alive and familiar because it possesses some characteristic or behavior that seems human. Personification is a literary device with which the author assigns human characteristics to non-human entities and is similar to anthropomorphism. When an author employs anthropomorphism, he or she assigns these human characteristics literally, such as having a character who is a talking animal. Finch, however, opts for the more subtle device of personification, bringing her setting to life through figures of speech that humanize the natural elements. Examples in ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie’’ include the owl directing the visitor where to go, the grass

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intentionally standing up straight, the glowworms enjoying showing off their light, the aromas that choose when they will float through the air, the night sky and the hills having faces, and the portrayal of the entire scene as one in which all of nature celebrates together. Ultimately, Finch’s use of personification evokes the theme of nature as a living community.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT Glorious Revolution of 1688 James II was the king of England, Scotland, and Ireland from 1685–88. He was a Catholic king whose strong arm angered and disgruntled Protestant Britain. He succeeded his brother King Charles II, who died in 1685 after achieving a peaceful working relationship between the king and Parliament. James was less interested in a mutual sharing of power, and quickly grabbed power back from Parliament. Not only did he stand firmly on his Catholicism and his staunch view of the divine right of kings, he also lacked diplomacy. Because James did not seem likely to produce an heir, whereas his Protestant brother already had children, most of James’s opponents were willing to tolerate a temporary Catholic rule on the hope that another Protestant reign was in the offing. When James set about aggressively restoring Catholicism as the predominant religion in Great Britain, he attempted to enlist Parliament to pave the way by overturning certain legislation that got in his way. Rebellions against the king did nothing to slow him down in his mission. When James assigned handpicked judges to the King’s Bench, or high court of common law, he began to make real headway; he was able to appoint staunch Catholics to various government posts, along with positions in the military and academia. When Church leaders, especially a group of bishops, resisted James’s orders to bring politics to the pulpit, the winds began to blow more strongly against James. Then James and his wife gave birth to an heir, which provoked his opponents to take action. In June 1688, seven prominent political leaders from both the Whig and the Tory parties sent a letter to Holland to William III of Orange. The clandestine letter encouraged William to come to England, overthrow James, and assume the throne. William was chosen because he was

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Protestant and also in the Stuart bloodline. The letter was well timed for William, as the Dutch Republic faced war with France. Having the English military on his country’s side would make all the difference. He arrived in England in November, and by December, he had overthrown James in the Glorious Revolution, at the conclusion of which James fled to France. A convention parliament met to arrange for the lawful transfer of the crown to William and his wife, Mary. On February 13, 1689, the two officially assumed the throne. Finch’s husband, Colonel Heneage Finch, built a career in government affairs and was active in James II’s court. The Finches’ refusal to support William and Mary after James was deposed created some difficulties for the couple.

Augustan Age in England ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie’’ is strongly associated with Augustan writing in England. The term comes from the rule of Emperor Augustus in Rome, who was known for his love of learning and careful attention to writing. In Great Britain, the dominant writers of what is considered the Augustan Age were Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Sir Richard Steele, and Joseph Addison. The exact dates of this age are a matter of debate; some put them as following Queen Anne’s reign (1702–14), while others equate them with the life of Alexander Pope (1688– 1744). Writing during this period intentionally paid homage to classical literature, using allusion to draw parallels between their own world and that of the ancients. The novel saw tremendous growth as a literary form, satire was popular, and poetry took on a more personal character. Writers often addressed political issues and concerns, yet did so from a philosophical or detached position. The serious writer was more of a keen observer of the world, rather than a figure trying to assert influence over his readers. Of course, in making observations, writers did exert a certain amount of influence, and this was especially seen through the satire that so characterized much Augustan writing. In poetry, Pope was the primary writer and representation of the Augustan Age. Poetry gave satire another venue, but poetry grew in its purpose in the Augustan Age. Poets adhered to conventions of form and versification, but also experimented with adaptations. For example, a traditional form might be applied to a subject not normally associated with that form. Most

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COMPARE & CONTRAST 1713: Few aristocratic women attempt to become serious poets, regardless of their skill or education. Women generally are not considered major literary figures. A woman trying to position herself as a serious poet would invite ridicule from the social elite and potentially embarrass her family. Today: Women are some of the most popular, celebrated, and frequently published poets. Many of the most well-known living poets are women, including Adrienne Rich and Louise Glu¨ck. Numerous women have earned the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, including Natasha Trethewey in 2007.  1713: Well-bred, well-educated young women like Finch are employed by the court, live with their fathers, live off a family inheritance, or marry respected men with desirable incomes. Today: Well-educated young women have the option of pursuing any number of career fields, including medicine, writing, teaching, law, science, or ministry. Such women also

retain the choice to marry men of their choosing and to stay home to care for their families.



notably, Augustan poets used classical forms to make modern statements. For example, a classical poem could be recast in a seventeenthcentury setting or could merely be retold in a way that thinly veiled criticism of current events. Poetry was not only political and social, and an increasing body of work showed how personal poetry could be, and how well it suited the poet’s need to reflect on his or her world. Many scholars have argued that the seeds of romanticism are in the Augustan Age.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW In Finch’s lifetime, she enjoyed a minimal amount of attention and respect for her work. Her reputation was largely based on ‘‘The

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1713: People are frequently drawn to the outdoors as a source of peaceful relaxation. It is common for aristocrats to unwind by enjoying a leisurely walk around the grounds of their property, or to enjoy a horse ride in the countryside. Nature is rarely far away, and this type of relaxation is readily accessible. Today: People are still drawn to the outdoors for recreation and relaxation. For the many people who live in suburbs and cities, going outdoors usually means walking around a neighborhood or visiting a park. Experiencing nature for an extended period of time might involve travel. While some still enjoy leisurely outdoor activities like walks, many Americans are drawn to rigorous activities like hiking, rock climbing, and white water rafting.

Spleen’’ and ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie.’’ Renewed interest in women writers, and especially overlooked women writers, led to Finch’s rediscovery in the twentieth century and inclusion among major English poets. Prior to that, William Wordsworth mentioned ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie’’ in the supplement to the preface of his and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1815). Because of this mention, some scholars place the poem in the pre-romantic tradition, while others maintain that the poem rightly belongs among the Augustan poetry of Finch’s time. Jamie Stanesa in Dictionary of Literary Biography weighs in with the comment, ‘‘Finch’s expression is more immediate and simple, and her versification ultimately exhibits an Augustan rather than a pre-Romantic sensibility.’’ Reuben A. Brower notes in Studies in Philology, ‘‘In the eighteenth century the poetry

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of religious meditation and moral reflection merged with the poetry of natural description in a composite type,’’ which includes Finch’s ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie.’’ He adds that those seeking the roots of romanticism in such poems should look beyond the mere setting. Other critics are more interested in the poem itself than in its proper category within English poetry. Charles H. Hinnant in Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 comments on Finch’s view of imagination. He writes that, as in other examples of her poetry, here ‘‘poetic consciousness is envisaged as an ‘emptiness’ or ‘lack’ which seeks to coincide with a peace or plenitude that it attributes to something outside of itself.’’ In Anne Finch and Her Poetry: A Critical Biography, Barbara McGovern comments on the melancholy imagery that permeates the poem. She explains that the images ‘‘are common to melancholic verse: moonlight, an owl’s screech, darkened groves and distant caverns, falling waters, winds, ancient ruins, and shadows that cast an eerie gloom over the entire isolated scene.’’ Among the strongest advocates for considering ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie’’ as serious poetry is Christopher Miller, writing in Studies in English Literature. In his essay, he openly regards Finch’s work as a masterpiece in its own right. While he considers the weight of Wordsworth’s endorsement in a romantic context, Miller finds plenty to like in ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie’’ apart from that. He deems it ‘‘remarkable,’’ noting the poem’s wandering in content and continuous subordinate clause. He comments, ‘‘In this temporal arc, Finch mimics the famous evening-todawn fantasy of scholarly devotion in John Milton’s ‘Il Penseroso’ (1631), but she focuses more on sensory absorption of the nocturnal world than on the humoral disposition associated with it.’’ He adds that the poem is ‘‘a lyric that responds in innovative ways to other poetic traditions.’’

CRITICISM Jennifer Bussey Bussey has a master’s degree in interdisciplinary studies and a bachelor’s degree in English literature. She is an independent writer specializing in literature. In this essay, Bussey explores in more depth the debate about whether Anne Finch’s ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie’’ is Augustan or pre-romantic.

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WHAT DO I READ NEXT? 

Barbara McGovern is one of the most wellknown experts on Finch and her work. In Anne Finch and Her Poetry: A Critical Biography (1992), McGovern combines autobiographical material with her own expertise on Finch’s work to give the reader a full sense of how the two influenced one another.



Edited by Eva Simmons, Augustan Literature, 1660–1789 (1994) compiles the greatest writing of the age by the writers who characterized the Augustan Age in England. Poetry, prose, and essays are all included and discussed in an easy-to-use volume organized by writer.



Edited by Denys Thompson, Selected Poems: Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (2006) is the most complete current collection of Finch’s poetry. It includes ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie,’’ ‘‘The Spleen,’’ and numerous other poems not often included in anthologies.



Edward Vallance’s The Glorious Revolution: 1688—Britain’s Fight for Liberty (2007) is among the more engaging treatments of the bloodless overthrow of James II by William and Mary. To further enliven the topic, Vallance includes comments by Karl Marx, Margaret Thatcher, and others.

Modern readers of Anne Finch’s work take a particular interest in ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie’’ with regard to its categorization. With the benefit of significant historical and literary hindsight, some scholars regard the poem as an example of the Augustan literature that was so popular in England at the time the poem was written (1713). But others see in the poem glimpses of one of the most influential literary movements to come— romanticism. From a chronological standpoint, ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie’’ seems best positioned among Augustan literature. This would place Finch alongside writers such as Alexander Pope,

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IT IS REASONABLE TO CONCLUDE, THEN, THAT FINCH WAS FAR MORE INFLUENCED AND INSPIRED BY THE AUGUSTANS THAN BY ANY PREROMANTIC INFLUENCES THAT MAY HAVE BEEN STIRRING IN ENGLAND IN 1713.’’

Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, and Jonathan Swift, who are considered great British writers and some of the best satirists ever published. But Augustan literature was not merely biting wit and lengthy verse and prose. Augustan literature paid homage to the Roman Augustan Age, in which language was exalted and treated carefully. Education and inquiry were also embraced, which is reflected in poetry that is technically sharp. English Augustan poets followed suit, writing verse that followed conventions and demonstrated mastery of language and technique. They relied on allusion to draw clear comparisons between their society and that of ancient Rome, or to bring to their verse the flavor of classical poetry. Like the novelists, playwrights, and essayists of the time, Augustan poets observed and commented on the world around them, but often retained a level of detachment. The result is poetry that is contemplative and insightful without being overly emotional or desperate. Augustan writers were not interested in the kind of rhetoric that seeks to sway readers to the author’s point of view, but wrote merely to comment and let the reader decide. In this way, Finch’s fables are consistent with the Augustan approach to literature; a fable simply relates a story, but the story happens to have a message that the reader may find compelling. Given the overall character of Augustan literature, why is ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie’’ considered one of its titles? The poem features many of the qualities that typified poetry of this period. It contains classical allusions to Zephyr and Philomel. Zephyr was the Greek god of the west wind, which was considered the most gentle and inviting wind. Philomel was a person who, according the Greek mythology, was turned into a nightingale. ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie’’ also boasts

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highly technical construction. The poem is a neat and even fifty lines long, composed of twentyfive heroic couplets. The rhyme scheme and the rhythm are held consistently over the course of all fifty lines. This is an impressive technical feat, and Finch succeeds in maintaining the integrity of her poem’s restrictive construction while smoothly relating the subject of the poem in a way that does not call too much attention to the pains she takes in writing in heroic couplets. Finch offers the reader a story of a nighttime experience (or vision), telling it as if she has no motive but to relate a story. The end of the poem, however, reveals the comment the poet makes about the struggles of daily life in civilization. Like a good Augustan poet, she offers it only as an observation of her own life, leaving it to the reader to personalize it to himself or his community. In the supplement to the preface of his and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s second edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1815, the renowned romantic poet William Wordsworth praised ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie’’ for its imagery in describing nature. Wordsworth himself saw something in Finch’s work that caught his romantic eye and resonated with him in its depiction of nature. For this reason, critics took another look at ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie’’ and many concluded that the poem is truly a pre-romantic work. Since all literary movements arise out of a set of circumstances before becoming full-fledged movements, it is not at all unusual to see the seeds of a movement in works that precede it. Wordsworth’s appreciation of the poem for something as distinctly romantic in its depiction of nature is enough to make any serious critic consider whether ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie’’ should be positioned among the earliest romantic poems. The romantic period officially began with the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s first edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 and lasted until about the mid-nineteenth century. For nearly a century, romanticism dominated English literature. During this time, England saw its own Industrial Revolution, major political reform, and the introduction of such philosophical perspectives as Utilitarianism. It was a dynamic time of upheaval, opportunity, and possibility, and optimism generally bested cynicism in the early years of romanticism. Toward the end of the period, literature raised questions and expressed doubt. Out of this came a view of

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the individual as very important, along with a deep appreciation for art and nature. In fact, many romantics considered nature to be among their wisest teachers. The great romantic poets included Wordsworth, Coleridge, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron. In addition to love of nature, the romantics exalted imagination and freedom from creative restraints. Finding romantic elements in ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie’’ is not difficult. The setting is nature, and it is described in affectionate detail. The speaker is completely enthralled by her experience outdoors, and she appreciates every aspect of it, making sure to include every animal, plant, flower, cloud, river, and glowworm in her telling. Nature is humanized through extensive use of anthropomorphism and personification, and the effect is that nature is characterized as being friendly, welcoming, and nurturing. The speaker is so at ease in the natural setting that she dreads returning to the life she leads in the civilized world. This assessment of the natural world versus man’s world is very much in line with the romantic way of thinking. Finch’s style in ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie’’ is also very lush and descriptive, as so much of romantic poetry is, and the experience is described in relation to the speaker’s emotional response to it. There is only one figure in the poem, which places emphasis on an individual and the value of that individual’s experience and imagination. All of these elements make it easy to see why so many scholars are anxious to line ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie’’ up with the classics of romantic poetry. ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie’’ contains qualities of both Augustan and romantic literature, therefore a look at the literary-historical context of the poem’s composition helps determine where it properly belongs. Finch was a well-educated woman who took care with her poetry to ensure that it was technically sound. She read the predominant poets of her time, and learned from what she read. She was, from an early age, drawn to poetry as a means of self-expression, even knowing that her pursuit would likely be only personal. When Finch wrote ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie,’’ the romantic period in England was still eighty-five years away. For her to explore romantic tendencies, there would have to have been something influential in her world leading her to turn her attentions to the things that would be uniquely romantic. Because there is

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not a large body of work by Finch that explores romantic themes, it seems unlikely that she was working out a new philosophy in ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie.’’ Further, the giants of the Augustan Age were in full force at the time Finch wrote ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie.’’ Pope’s classic An Essay on Criticism was published in 1711. Pope is not at all associated with the romantic period, and his views on criticism, like his writing, are consistent with the Augustan perspective. Also in 1711, two other major players in Augustan literature, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele established The Spectator, a journal that would become the most influential periodical of the century. Pope’s essay and Addison and Steele’s periodical are two major additions to England’s literary history, and ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie’’ comes on their heels, written by a woman who kept up with such things. It is reasonable to conclude, then, that Finch was far more influenced and inspired by the Augustans than by any preromantic influences that may have been stirring in England in 1713. Source: Jennifer Bussey, Critical Essay on ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie,’’ in Poetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2009.

Susannah B. Mintz In the following excerpt, Mintz discusses how Finch’s nature poems, including ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie,’’ utilize the natural world as a spiritual and political counterbalance to an anti-feminist society. Anne Kingsmill Finch, the Countess of Winchelsea (1661–1720), holds an established position in the history of women’s writing, but scholars have not always agreed on whether Finch reproduces or challenges the gender-bias of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century poetic conventions. On the one hand, Finch could be outspoken in her critique of male resistance to women’s poetry, but on the other, Finch herself clearly worries about how her poetry will be received, and thus seems at times to uphold the very standards against which her own writing might be doomed to fall short. The complaint that opens ‘‘The Introduction,’’ for example, is well known for its pithy illustration of the obstacles facing women writers. Here, Finch anticipates the ‘‘censure’’ (2) that will attend any woman’s entrance into the public sphere, and

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ON THE ONE HAND, FINCH COULD BE OUTSPOKEN IN HER CRITIQUE OF MALE RESISTANCE TO WOMEN’S POETRY, BUT ON THE OTHER, FINCH HERSELF CLEARLY WORRIES ABOUT HOW HER POETRY WILL BE RECEIVED, AND THUS SEEMS AT TIMES TO UPHOLD THE VERY STANDARDS AGAINST WHICH HER OWN WRITING MIGHT BE DOOMED TO FALL SHORT.’’

assumes that men will be quick to ‘‘condemn’’ (7) women’s writing as ‘‘insipid, empty, uncorrect’’ (4): Alas! a woman that attempts the pen, Such an intruder on the rights of men, Such a presumptuous creature is esteem’d, The fault can by no virtue be redeemed. They tell us, we mistake our sex and way; Good breeding, fashion, dancing, dressing, play Are the accomplishments we should desire; To write, or read, or think, or to enquire Would cloud our beauty . . . (9–17) Worried about exposing a lack of wit, Finch displays her intelligence through irony, appeal to biblical authority, and rhetorical sophistication, thus proving the inadequacy of misogynistic denouncement. But at the very same time, such poetic strategies demonstrate the lengths to which she must go to ensure that her work will not be read as ‘‘uncorrect’’ (the ‘‘fair’’ sex may be deemed but ‘‘fair,’’ mediocre writers). The poem thus records a tectonic unsteadiness, working to deconstruct the myth of women as beautiful but insignificant even as it manifests the poet’s anxiety about the ‘‘beauty’’ of her work in the very world that imposes that censure. In what follows, I will argue that poetry, for Finch, becomes a site of contest over the refracting discourse of ‘‘fair.’’ By manipulating her culture’s assumptions about beauty, femininity, and intellect, Finch’s work ultimately exposes the insufficiencies of a patriarchal law that reproduces ‘‘unfairness’’ in both its construction of women and its determination of what counts as aesthetically pleasing. In a deceptively witty

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manner, Finch admits that by presenting herself to the world intellectually, she may render that self a monstrous deviation—the ‘‘ugly’’ spectacle that is the woman writer. By dint of such acknowledgment, however, she exacts her own form of condemnation, utilizing this catalogue of patriarchal insults (‘‘an intruder,’’ ‘‘a presumptuous creature’’) to impugn the culture’s construction of a ‘‘fair sex’’ confined to ‘‘the dull manage of a servile house’’ (19) and to the shallow maintenance of beauty. Despite, but also because of, insecurity about their worth, Finch’s poems work to rescue women from confinement as objects in men’s poetry, and insist upon the legitimacy of female visibility and speech . . . . Poetry, Finch acknowledges, is dangerous, because it becomes a public act, its creator enters into the realm of evaluation with its arbitrary criteria and its arbiters of taste. What’s more— and indeed as an exact result of that value-making domain—art is dismayingly prone to obscuring true feeling, and can thus keep two people at odds with one another. In ‘‘A Song’’ (‘‘’Tis strange, this Heart’’), for example, the speaker longs to know ‘‘what’s done’’ (4) in the heart of her other (lover, husband, friend?): In vain I ask it of your Eyes Which subt’ly would my Fears controul; For Art has taught them to disguise, Which Nature made t’ explain the Soul. (5–8) The speaker here invites a certain kind of looking, one so completely stripped of artifice that the soul’s integrity would be appropriately revealed through the windows of the eyes. Significantly, though, she also seems to recognize that even an honest gaze, a gaze unencumbered or unmediated by the influence of cultural narrative—if such a look could be posited at all, as Finch implies that it could not—would nonetheless be a containing, limiting, even policing one, capable of a form of ‘‘controul’’ over female emotion. The point is moot, however, since even ‘‘your Eyes’’ have succumbed to the false show of Art’s disguises. At one level, ‘‘A Song’’ seems tonally to be addressed to an intimate other, one whose openness and, perhaps more desperately, whose genuine affection the speaker craves a guarantee of. A second possible referent for the poem’s ‘‘you,’’ however, is not a single auditor at all, but rather the audience—male readers both specifically (as

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opposed to women) and in general (in their powerful collectivity). Such a reading turns a private lament about the failure of interpersonal communication into a direct statement about the poet’s wish for public approval of her writing as well as her careful perusal of readers’ responses for the approbation she hopes they might contain. In this sense the poem proliferates and reiterates a set of interlocking worries that pervades much of Finch’s work. Since words can dissemble, be untrue, or are too heavy, too many, too deceptive, to find ‘‘Truth’’ (12) in them, how can one—especially a woman—write poetry that expresses oneself, with words that match feelings and intent; and, more troublingly, how could anyone else understand those words as they were meant? Since readers (men, writers, critics) are far too schooled in manipulating words to their advantage for any positive judgment to be trusted, how can a woman penetrate to the essence of another’s evaluation of her work? If a writer can’t trust words, how can she trust that an unfriendly audience will accept poetry from a woman? In short, how can, and should, a woman write? By way of unfolding this set of questions, I would like to argue for Finch’s ‘‘The Petition for an Absolute Retreat’’ as an ars poetica that takes the mobius strip of writing and specularity as its thematic and structural principle. ‘‘The Petition’’ is usually categorized, along with ‘‘The Tree’’ and ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie,’’ as one of Finch’s best-known nature poems, works contingent upon a distinction between nature and culture and which posit the natural world as a spiritual or political counteractant to an unfriendly (antifeminist, anti-Stuart) society. The retreat of ‘‘The Petition’’ can thus be read as a location— for example, of solidarity with other women, in what Carol Barash describes as a ‘‘rethink[ing of] the pastoral topos of political retreat as a place where women’s shared political sympathies can be legitimately expressed’’; or a process—an elaborated metaphor for what Charles Hinnant reads as ‘‘a philosophic ascent of the human mind’’ (150). I would add to these convincing readings the possibility that the petition is a suit for and mapping out of both a place and a process of writing, which could be protected from the incursions of artifice, ambition, dishonesty, and isolating competitiveness. In this sense ‘‘The Petition’’ stands as a potent manifesto of a way of composing poetry that could resist the pressure of writing to satisfy the demands of

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patriarchal readers, a constraint to which, Finch reveals elsewhere, she often felt compelled to succumb. The fantasized locale of ‘‘The Petition’’ is an abundant natural place laden with ‘‘All, that did in Eden grow’’ (except the ‘‘Forbidden Tree’’) (35–36), a place of ‘‘Unaffected Carelesness’’ (71) far ‘‘from Crouds, and Noise’’ (126), a place where, the speaker exults, she might ‘‘remain secure, / Waste, in humble Joys and pure’’ (202–3). The speaker repeatedly longs to relieve herself of the trappings of a stylized femininity, and to realign ‘‘inside’’ with ‘‘outside’’ in a new form of poetic, philosophical, psychical wholeness: she asks for ‘‘plain, and wholesome Fare’’ (33); for clothes ‘‘light, and fresh as May’’ (65), and ‘‘Habit cheap and new’’ (67); for ‘‘No Perfumes [to] have there a Part, / Borrow’d from the Chymists Art’’ (72–73); and when she ‘‘must be fine,’’ she will ‘‘In . . . natural Coulours shine’’ (96–97). It is significant, then, that the express longing to inhabit a domain unfettered by the accouterments and affectations of culture is dressed in so foliate a poetry, whose stanzas are thick with allusion and detail—and, more to our purposes, that the poem repeatedly returns to, and turns on, the phrasing and imagery of ‘‘those Windings, and that Shade,’’ the line that closes each of the seven substantial stanzas. The image (the psychical ‘‘syntax,’’ as it were) of arriving at a feminized realm of writing and psychic pleasure through ‘‘Windings’’ and ‘‘Shade’’ works to establish an opposition far more pointed (if deceptively counterintuitive) than a dichotomy between an idealized, pure, female landscape and the corrupted involutions of patriarchal civilization. If ‘‘Windings’’ conducts us on a topographical level along a path designed to ward off ‘‘Intruders’’ (8), it also traces the contours of a poetic impulse. Only by twisting and turning, Finch seems to say, does the woman poet avoid the traps of copping to male desire; only by (with the use of) and through (by sustaining the duration of) a deliberate traveling along a winding course, entangling and coiling oneself in one’s own poetic energies, can freedom from male expectation be found. In one way, the very lushness of the natural setting and the poetry that describes it acts as a corrective to institutionalized cultural (human, male) rigidities of politics or social grace. At the same time, though, the poem’s depiction of this pastoral Retreat is undeniably laced with

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references to the very human world it purports to eschew, as when the ‘‘Willows, on the Banks’’ are shown to be ‘‘Gather’d into social Ranks’’ (134– 35). What is at work, I think, is Finch’s understanding that her own call for ‘‘an Absolute Retreat’’ leaves in place a problematic set of binary oppositions (male/female, culture/nature, reason/emotion, ornamentation/purity, and so on) without defying the epistemology on which such ideologies rest. Instead, Finch suggests a wholly different method of breaking down patriarchal schema via poetic meandering—kind of post-lapsarian revision of the scene of errored wandering that constitutes lapsarian loss—that might conduct women to paradisal space. In a complicated sense, to doff the ornamentation demanded of women might in itself be linked to the act of writing poetry, which, according to convention, engenders a mannishly unfeminine woman. But Finch goes further than this, arguing instead for a woman writer to symbolically divest herself of dependence upon the apparel of male-centered literary standards (to make herself ‘‘plain’’) and then to redress herself by following a symbolically ‘‘Winding’’ course that separates her from the domain of men and conducts her to a self-determined place that cannot be seen from without. Finch deepens this desire to disentangle herself from constructions (and constrictions) of gender in the poem, but the desire is further problematized by virtue of the poem’s very composition, which re-enacts a ‘‘feminine’’ adorning. Thus the poem in part exhibits what is both ‘‘male’’ and ‘‘female’’—but in such a way as to deprive each category of ontological status. In this ‘‘The Petition’’ sets in high relief an axiomatic paradox, that the oppositional categories of ‘‘masculine’’ and ‘‘feminine’’ are in fact present to and in each other, and that the toppling of patriarchal authority may best be achieved not simply by reversing the standings of those terms but by a more involved process of poetic ‘‘windings’’ and in a place of ‘‘shade’’ that emphatically contradict masculinist standards of reason, genius, and the pursuit of convention as ‘‘enlightened’’ states of being or mental activities. That the retreat holds out the promise of intellectual stimulation for women in particular becomes clear in the relationship between two passages, one requesting ‘‘A Partner’’ (106), the other ‘‘a Friend’’ (197). Though the speaker asks in the first instance for a partner ‘‘suited to my

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Mind’’ (106), the heterosexual bond is described primarily in terms of a pre-lapsarian fantasy of the ‘‘Love’’ and ‘‘Passion’’ (120) of ‘‘but two’’ (112) whose union is undisturbed by ‘‘Bus’ness,’’ ‘‘Wars,’’ or ‘‘Domestick Cares’’ (114–15). In contrast to a vision of interconnectedness which enumerates no other pastime but being ‘‘In Love’’ (120), the model for friendship is the woman Arminda, who, Warm’d anew [Ardelia’s] drooping Heart, and Life diffus’d thro’ every Part; Mixing Words, in wise Discourse, Of such Weight and won’drous Force, As could all her Sorrows charm, And transitory Ills disarm; With Wit, from an unmeasured Store, To Woman ne’er allow’d before. (166–75) Women, once situated in the symbolic realm of the ‘‘Retreat,’’ will be able to enjoy a wider set of options for how to be and behave, both individually and in consort with each other, than the earlier description of wedded happiness had seemed to offer. Women can soothe and rejuvenate each other—unsurprisingly feminine tasks that take on subtly new meaning in the context of a definitively feminine space—but also, more defiantly, they can discover themselves capable of ‘‘Mixing Words, in wise Discourse,’’ of using language with ‘‘such Weight and wond’rous Force’’ that it would ‘‘charm,’’ ‘‘disarm,’’ and ‘‘Chea[r]’’ one another in a way that seems magically ‘‘delightful.’’ Further, women might find ‘‘Wit’’ here, that elusive quality of mind and poetry held so firmly—‘‘To Woman ne’er allow’d before’’—by men. The ambiguity of ‘‘allow’d’’ conveys the point exactly: that women have been excluded from the ranks of male poets not because they can’t produce good work, but because of the ‘‘mistaken rules’’ of men who won’t concede women as equal participants in artistic creation (‘‘The Introduction’’). Arminda, then, serves as less the singular exception than as an embodied metaphor for what might obtain for women by pursuing ‘‘those Windings and that Shade’’—what the speaker herself calls, later in the poem, ‘‘Contemplations of the Mind’’ (283). Throughout her work, Finch’s concern is not simply to vent ‘‘spleen’’ against anti-feminist bias, but to ironically undercut the paradigms of that bias by manipulating the very language of its constructions of femininity. ‘‘The Petition’’

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reiterates that project in a striking way, suggesting that the subversive ambiguities of a woman’s work may provide the necessary ‘‘overgrowth’’ to protect it from male dismissal. As many have noted, Finch’s complete oeuvre includes a broad range of poetic forms; Hinnant remarks that it is ‘‘one of the most diverse of any English poet— encompassing songs, pastorals, dialogues, Pindaric odes, tales, beast fables, hymns, didactic compositions, biblical paraphrases, verse epistles, and satires’’ (17). Such variety implies another form of ‘‘winding,’’ the trying-on of different poetic styles (and selves) that manifest the search for a way of writing that could both legitimize her and solidify an interior sense of poetic integrity. It is crucial, I think, to Finch’s ideological and literary purposes that though the poem amply analogizes the quality of experience possible in the ‘‘Retreat,’’ it also rests in a subjective mood, called for and imagined but never realized within the frame of the poem itself. The closest we come, in a sense, are the ‘‘windings’’ and ‘‘shade’’ that act as threshold to—but also, powerfully, as guards of—the actual place of a woman’s poetic spirit. It is often said of Finch that she was a pivotal writer, echoing predominant seventeenthcentury poetic patterns (in particular, the theme of female friendship in Katherine Philips and the poetry of pastoral retreat); using popular eighteenth-century forms to her own, sometimes feminist, sometimes sociopolitical aims; and finally, gesturing toward the inward-looking preoccupations of the Romantics. Such ambiguity in temporally locating Finch seems doubly apt: it accounts for the stylistic, tonal, and structural complexity of her work, but also, in a less direct way, suggests that she has followed her own advice, writing poems ‘‘through those Windings, and that Shade.’’ Source: Susannah B. Mintz, ‘‘Anne Finch’s ‘Fair’ Play,’’ in Midwest Quarterly, Vol. 45, No. 1, Autumn 2003, pp. 74–95.

Harriett Devine Jump In the following essay, Jump addresses the misrepresentation of Finch as a nature poet and the resultant popularity of such poems as ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie.’’ Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661– 1720), has the distinction of being one of the few women poets whose works—some of them, at least—have consistently found their way into anthologies. Wordsworth admired her poetry:

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his comments in the ‘Essay Supplementary’ to the Preface of the Lyrical Ballads (1815) on the ‘new image[s] of external nature’ in her ‘Nocturnal Reverie’ are well known, he included sixteen of her poems in a collection of women’s poetry compiled for Lady Mary Lowther in 1819, and, in a letter to Alexander Dyce of May 1830, described her style as ‘often admirable, chaste, tender and vigorous’. Despite Finch’s obvious importance, however, the standard edition remains Myra Reynolds’s The Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea (Chicago, 1903), although this has long been recognized as incomplete: it omits, among other things, the large body of manuscript poems held at Wellesley College, Massachusetts and recently edited by J. M. Ellis D’Allesandro (Florence, 1988). She has been equally badly served by biographers and critics: no full-length biography or comprehensive critical assessment has hitherto been attempted. Barbara McGovern sets out to redress the balance. Her critical biography of Finch covers new ground in a number of ways. Finch’s life has been painstakingly researched; her poetry— published and unpublished—is analysed; and, by reference to the political and historical conditions prevailing during her lifetime, her work is placed in context for the first time. This is, perhaps, of particular importance, since Finch was, as Barbara McGovern points out, displaced not only by her gender but also by her political ideology and her religious affiliation. Having been appointed, at the age of 21, maid of honour to Mary of Modena, the future wife of James II, she (and her husband) remained loyal to James when he was forced into exile by the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and were among the Nonjurors who refused to take the oath of allegiance to the new monarchs William and Mary. As a result of their persistent Jacobitism they were exiled from court and faced a future of persecution and financial hardship. They settled for a modest existence in Kent, in some ways beneficial for Finch’s poetry, but it is clear that they frequently found country life lonely and isolated and, as time went on, Finch evidently felt restless and longed for the stimulation of London and its literary world. She did manage relatively brief periods of residence in London, and made the acquaintance of Swift and Pope and their circle, but it is not impossible that some of the melancholy which dogged her for most of her adult life resulted from the marginalized position in which she almost always felt herself to be.

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Barbara McGovern argues that, as a poet, Anne Finch has been continually misrepresented. The fact that Wordsworth praised her in terms which suggest that she was primarily a nature poet has led to the inclusion in standard anthologies of her ‘Nocturnal Reverie’ and ‘Petition for an Absolute Retreat’ despite the fact that, as Barbara McGovern points out, ‘of the more than 230 poems she wrote . . . only about half a dozen are devoted primarily to descriptions of external nature, and these, with the exception of the two just named, are not among her better poems’ (p. 78). These poems, she goes on to argue, are products of their age which do not prefigure Romanticism in any significant way: Finch sees human beings as providing the spiritual continuity and depth to life, even within the context of a natural retreat. Those elements (images of wandering in lonely haunts, concern with shade and darkness) which could be read as Romantic have recently been identified as characteristic of feminist poetics. Barbara McGovern devotes two chapters to Finch’s use of the pastoral, a genre to which she returned constantly throughout her life and which she adapted to a wide range of styles and themes. The pastoral mode not only allowed her to write about love and passion in ways which, as a woman, she would not otherwise have been able to do with propriety, it also enabled her publicly to criticize her own age from the standpoint of a moral spokesperson confronting the ills of society. Barbara McGovern argues that Finch’s most sustained effort at satire, ‘Ardelia’s Answer to Ephelia’, bears many thematic and technical similarities to Rochester’s ‘Letter from Artemesia in the Town to Chloe in the Country’, and points out that both poets were Royalists who moved for a time in the same circles. However, she sees Finch’s poem as a revisionary version of Rochester’s more famous satire. Another chapter is devoted to ‘The Spleen’, the Pindaric ode for which Finch was best known in her own lifetime and throughout the eighteenth century. Barbara McGovern sees this as one of Finch’s most important poems, representative in both style and content of a large body of her work. Finch herself was afflicted by melancholy—a disorder much more likely to affect women than men, and thus having genderdiscriminatory implications—for most of her adult life. Although, as Barbara McGovern

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points out, there was a tradition of melancholic poetry at the period, Finch’s poem is unique in that it combines an intensely personal approach with rigorous analysis and stark realism, and because the subject raises issues regarding both the nature of poetic commitment and the right of a woman to become a poet. The final years before Finch’s death in 1720 seem to have been filled with adversity, and much of her later poetry places a marked emphasis on themes of religion and the significance of human suffering. Barbara McGovern includes, as an Appendix, a selection of poems from the Wellesley Manuscript. These, together with the works discussed within the text, testify to the impressively wide range of style and subject-matter at Finch’s command. Capable of both serious reflection and satirical wit, of tender tributes to marital love and female friendship as well as harsh judgements on the modes and manners of her time, she was clearly a considerable poet, and it is easy to agree with Barbara McGovern’s judgement that she has been seriously underestimated. Anne Finch and her Poetry has many virtues. Barbara McGovern has dealt efficiently with the biographical and historical material, although the lack of much in the way of documentary evidence means that her account of Finch’s childhood and education, in particular, is based largely on surmise ‘from what is known about her as an adult and from what is known about the typical upbringing for girls from upper class families at the time’ (p. 10). The footnotes are extremely full and satisfyingly scholarly, although a reasonably well-informed reader may feel that some of the better-known historical background—the Great Fire of London, or the Glorious Revolution, for example—has been annotated rather too heavily. Although, admittedly, the lack of ready availability of much of the poetry means that paraphrase is sometimes called for, the analysis of individual poems seems at times a little ponderous and heavy-handed. Overall, however, the book is a useful addition to a relatively new field of English studies. Source: Harriett Devine Jump, ‘‘Anne Finch and Her Poetry: A Critical Biography,’’ in Review of English Studies, Vol. 46, No. 183, August 1995, pp. 410–12.

Charles H. Hinnant In the following excerpt, Hinnant compares the themes in Finch’s poems ‘‘To the Nightingale’’ and ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie.’’

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. . . The critics of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who once searched Finch’s poetry for Romantic tendencies usually overlooked or minimized the doubts that prevent her from recognizing a transcendental legitimizing source of inspiration. They tacitly acknowledged her demystifying rejection of transcendent flight in their praise of her as an earth-bound ‘‘nature’’ poet. She is usually described as a poet of sensation, not song. Edmund Gosse is typical in his assessment of her capacity for ‘‘seeing nature and describing what she sees’’ and so of offering ‘‘accurate transcripts of country life.’’ But even this conventional estimate of her poetry as descriptive rather than inspired or reflective appears misleading. On the surface, it seems reminiscent of Addison’s Lockean distinction between the primary pleasures of imagination deriving from perceived objects and the secondary pleasures deriving from remembered or absent objects (Spectator 411). Yet it is not so easy to determine whether Finch was ever a nature poet in the Addisonian sense. Her two most famous nature poems, ‘‘The Petition for an Absolute Retreat’’ and ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie,’’ are not really descriptive, as is James Thomson’s georgic ‘‘The Seasons,’’ but elegiac or invocatory, summoning up a landscape that is either absent or hypothetical. A similar sense of absence also haunts Finch’s powerful elegy, ‘‘Upon the Death of Sir William Twisden,’’ where the weeping clouds and rivers of the pastoral elegist are exposed as illusory, fictive transmutations of reality. In a sense the poem argues that the mind must resist this seduction into illusion and hence must confront the unpleasant fact that ‘‘Nature (unconcern’d for our relief) / Persues her settl’d path, her fixt, and steaddy course’’ (lines 27–28). Description, a poetic strategy that fuses the eye and its object, seems to overlook the skepticism inherent in ‘‘Upon the Death of Sir William Twisden’’ as well as in ‘‘To The Nightingale,’’ both of which presuppose a disjunction between subject and object. ‘‘To the Nightingale’’ is also important in the history of poetry for another reason. It exemplifies what is perhaps Finch’s most sophisticated attempt to master a recurrent problem of the seventeenth-century female poet: how to participate in a discourse in which the poet is defined as a masculine subject. Outwardly, the poem remains faithful to the conventional structure of ode and lyric, organizing itself around the dyad of (masculine) poet and (feminine) muse.

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THE CRITICS OF THE NINETEENTH AND EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURIES WHO ONCE SEARCHED FINCH’S POETRY FOR ROMANTIC TENDENCIES USUALLY OVERLOOKED OR MINIMIZED THE DOUBTS THAT PREVENT HER FROM RECOGNIZING A TRANSCENDENTAL LEGITIMIZING SOURCE OF INSPIRATION.’’

But the nature of their roles is altogether different from that traditionally associated with the two figures. Finch’s purpose is certainly not to show the archetypal permanence of the distinction, nor is it (as in ‘‘The Introduction’’) to show the ill effects of the distinction upon the female poet. Instead, Finch initially at least wants to universalize the opposition radically, by stripping it of the customary attributes of gender, by elevating the poet, muse, and nightingale to ideal categories. All of the characteristics that make the muse feminine—beauty, grace, pity, harmony with nature, and so on—disappear. There is no room in this version of the nightingale for an explicit allusion to the mute Philomela—the classical archetype of woman as victim, nor for Sidney’s nightingale whose ‘‘throat in tunes expresseth / What grief her breast oppresseth, / For Tereus’ force on her chaste will prevailing’’ (lines 6–8). There is instead a process of idealization, an exchange of attributes, which transforms the grief-stricken female singer into an exemplary model, one that applies to all poets. Yet this process of idealization necessarily involves a suppression of the gender that enables this model to come into existence. The universality of the figure of the poet who ‘‘when best he sings, is plac’d against a Thorn’’ (line 13) depends upon a figure herself mute, unable to make herself intelligible. Because the figure of the poet is universalized in ‘‘To The Nightingale,’’ the anxiety of female authorship is not problematical in this poem. Suppressing the customary attributes of gender helps to make room for a different kind of concern, one that is poetic rather than cultural. The muse is called forth to incarnate an

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ideal in which there will be no disparity between sound and meaning: ‘‘Words’’ and ‘‘Accents’’ are to be fused into a single ‘‘fluent Vein’’ in which ‘‘Syllables’’ and ‘‘Sense’’ are inseparable (lines 17–21). The muse and the nightingale are not, however, to be allowed to collapse into one another. The muse is rather asked to retain ‘‘Still some Spirit of the Brain’’ because it would otherwise yield a primitive and undifferentiated world of sound, instead of a complex and organized unison of sound and sense which can serve as the goal as well as the inspiration of poetry. This distinction is linked to Henry More’s contention that while ‘‘a Nightingale may vary with her voice into a multitude of interchangeable Notes, and various Musical falls and risings . . . should she but sing one Hymn or Hallelujah, I should deem her no bird but an Angel.’’ But Finch lacks More’s faith in the superiority of a divinely inspired human art to nature: while the muse of ‘‘To The Nightingale’’ may inspire, she is finally powerless. The speaker’s recognition of this impotence is undoubtedly accompanied by the loss of a conviction in the possibility of a union of sound and sense. This loss of faith is consistent with the new understanding of language that emerged in the late seventeenth century. By acknowledging a gulf between the nightingale’s song and the poet’s speech, Finch tacitly adopts the point of view of theorists like Hobbes and Locke who deny the naturalness of the received link between signifier and signified. ‘‘To The Nightingale’’ is thus explicitly concerned with the limits of poetic signification. Because the invocation to the muse is evoked in terms of its possible relation to a surrogate self with whom the poet cannot identify, we become aware that poetry cannot become the unequivocal reappropriation of natural song. In An Essay on Criticism Pope was to give canonical formulation to the doctrine that the sound must at least ‘‘seem an echo to the sense.’’ But here the attempt at imitative harmony seems only futile, not ‘‘poetic.’’ By a kind of downward transformation, its shifting octosyllabic couplets, the medium of the ‘‘middle’’ style, only succeed in drawing attention to the close relation between poetic language and discursive prose. Through the contrast between music and speech, Finch acknowledges a collapse of faith in the power of the poet as singer rather than as persuader. Yet it is precisely this collapse of faith which may help us to assess the main body of her poetry.

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Implicit in many other poems is a tendency to self-consciousness which results from their overtly explicit secondariness. The characteristic late seventeenth-century forms of beast fable, religious meditation, pastoral dialogue, and moralizing reflection, functioning as they do within the framework of the poetic enunciated in ‘‘To The Nightingale,’’ recognize something substitutive and sentimental in lyric inspiration. As Brower said, though in another context, ‘‘there are in Lady Anne’s poetry traces’’ of a ‘‘union of lyricism with the diction and movement of speech.’’ By retaining touches of humor and wit, by refusing to purge diction of common usage, her poetry draws attention to the element of rhetoric and representation in poetic language. Many of Finch’s poems may, as Brower insisted, be characterized as attenuated metaphysical verse, the work of a ‘‘minor poetess’’ in a period of transition. But one can also argue that ‘‘To The Nightingale’’ occupies a place in Finch’s poetry analogous to Swift’s renunciation of the Muse’s ‘‘visionary pow’r’’ (line 152) in ‘‘Occasioned by Sir William Temple’s Late Illness and Recovery’’ and to Pope’s decision, announced in the ‘‘Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot,’’ to abandon ‘‘Fancy’s maze’’ and moralize ‘‘his song’’ (lines 340–41). The union of ‘‘rapture and cool gaiety’’ in her poetry, its reliance upon colloquial idiom, and its relative looseness of ‘‘texture,’’ may imply a similar demystified rejection of transcendent flight—something which is asserted explicitly through the thematic concerns of ‘‘To The Nightingale.’’ Finch thus makes opposite use of a convention which previous poetic generations had used to affirm the validity of poetry as inspired discourse. The implications of her loss of confidence in that discourse are not confined to ‘‘To The Nightingale’’ but can be seen, in different ways, in such poems as ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie’’ and ‘‘The Bird.’’ In these poems, as in ‘‘To The Nightingale,’’ poetic consciousness is envisaged as an ‘‘emptiness’’ or ‘‘lack’’ which seeks to coincide with a peace or plenitude that it attributes to something outside of itself—whether it be the ‘‘inferiour World’’ of domestic animals, a bird, or more specifically, the nightingale. In the conventional ode, this lack is reflected, as Norman Maclean put it, in the speaker’s hope ‘‘that the quality he is contemplating . . . will make its power felt again in him.’’ Yet the ambivalence generated by the speaker’s failure to achieve this hope, which is evident in ‘‘To The Nightingale,’’

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is also present in the other two poems. In ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie,’’ this ambivalence is not only manifested in the hypothetical mode in which the poem’s argument is cast but also in the restraint which confines ‘‘the free Soul’’ to the claim that it ‘‘thinks’’ the ‘‘inferiour World’’ is like its own (lines 43, 46). Also at issue is the anticipation of morning that prevents the speaker’s experience of ‘‘solemn Quiet’’ from becoming anything more than a momentary respite from a renewal of ‘‘Our Cares, our Toils, our Clamours . . . / Or Pleasures, seldom reach’d, again pursu’d’’ (lines 45–50). In ‘‘The Bird’’ the speaker’s ambivalence is manifested in a doubt which represents the bird as alternatively guardian of the heart and male surrogate, the ‘‘false accomplice’’ of love (line 30). ‘‘The Tree,’’ by contrast, avoids this ambivalence because it presupposes an absolute separation between human spectator and natural object and thus achieves the serene classical beauty that Ivor Winters detected in the poem. That ‘‘The Tree’’ is epideictic and commemorative only serves to confirm its detachment from a surrogate which the poet seeks to praise rather than to emulate . . . .

A Critical Biography, University of Georgia Press, 1992, pp. 159–78.

Source: Charles H. Hinnant, ‘‘Song and Speech in Anne Finch’s ‘To the Nightingale,’’’ in Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, Vol. 31, No. 3, Summer 1991, pp. 499–513.

Elliott, Lang, A Guide to Night Sounds: The Nighttime Sounds of Sixty Mammals, Birds, Amphibians, and Insects, Stackpole Books, 2004. Elliott’s guide to the sounds of animals and insects at night includes descriptions, explanations, and pictures to help the reader identify and enjoy the sounds of night. The book also includes a CD of many of the sounds described in the book, providing a full hour of recorded sounds.

SOURCES Brower, Reuben A., ‘‘Lady Winchilsea and the Poetic Tradition of the Seventeenth Century,’’ in Studies in Philology, Vol. 42, No. 1, January 1945, pp. 61–80. Harmon, William, and Hugh Holman, ‘‘Romanticism,’’ in A Handbook to Literature, 9th ed., Prentice Hall, 2003, pp. 445–46. ———, ‘‘Romantic Period in English Literature,’’ in A Handbook to Literature, 9th ed., Prentice Hall, 2003, pp. 448–49. Finch, Anne, ‘‘A Nocturnal Reverie,’’ in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 1, 5th ed., edited by M. H. Abrams et. al., W. W. Norton, 1986, pp. 1961–62. Hinnant, Charles H., ‘‘Song and Speech in Anne Finch’s ‘To the Nightingale,’’’ in Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, Vol. 31, 1991, pp. 499–513. McGovern, Barbara, ‘‘‘The Spleen’: Melancholy, Gender, and Poetic Identity,’’ in Anne Finch and Her Poetry:

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Miller, Christopher R., ‘‘Staying Out Late: Anne Finch’s Poetics of Evening,’’ in Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, Vol. 45, No. 3, Summer 2005, pp. 603–23. ‘‘Poetry,’’ in Pulitzer Prizes, http://www.pulitzer.org/ bycat/Poetry (accessed October 17, 2008). Stanesa, Jamie, ‘‘Anne Finch,’’ in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 95, Eighteenth-Century British Poets, First Series, Gale Research, 1990, pp. 64–71.

FURTHER READING Dowd, Michelle M., and Julie A. Ackerle, Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England, Ashgate, 2007. Down and Ackerle demonstrate how women in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England used writing as a means of self-expression and how their social and familial position affected how and why they wrote. The authors consider many types of writing, ranging from recipe cards to diaries.

McGovern, Barbara, and Charles Hinnant, eds., The Anne Finch Wellesley Manuscript Poems, University of Georgia Press, 1998. This volume contains fifty-three poems by Finch, complete with commentary, introductory material, and scholarly notes. Mendelson, Sarah, and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England: 1550–1720, Oxford University Press, 2000. Here, Mendelson and Crawford provide a thorough reference on what life was like for women in all walks of life and in every part of the social strata in early modern England. The authors explore topics such as marriage, roles of women in religion and politics, working women, and the separate society shared only by women.

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Oranges The poem ‘‘Oranges’’ by Gary Soto tells the story of a twelve-year-old boy who goes over to a girl’s house on a cold December morning, bringing two oranges in his pocket. They go out walking and end up at a drugstore candy counter, where he offers to buy her any candy she wants. When the chocolate bar she chooses costs more than he has in his pocket, the boy finds himself in a potentially embarrassing situation. He quickly manages to appeal to the store’s cashier, subtly, without the girl noticing, and is given the candy. As they walk back to her house, he basks in both the gratitude of the girl and the charity of the store clerk, feeling warmth and heat emanate from himself, as if he were able to hold not just the orange he is peeling but fire itself.

GARY SOTO 1985

This is one of the most popular, widely recognized poems by the renowned Chicano poet. Soto first gained fame as a poet, then went on to use his stories about his childhood, with its poverty and the conflicts of growing up in a bicultural household, to become a familiar name in the field of young adult literature. Originally published in Soto’s 1985 poetry collection Black Hair, ‘‘Oranges’’ is also included in his 1995 collection New and Selected Poems. In addition, the last line of this poem was used for the title of another book that ‘‘Oranges’’ is included in called A Fire in My Hands, which is a collection of poems intended for grades six through ten.

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In 1979, Soto began a long association with the University of California—Berkeley: he was an assistant professor from 1979 to 1985, an associate professor of English and ethnic studies from 1985 to 1991, and a part-time senior lecturer from 1991 to 1993. During that time, his fame as a writer grew. Among the many forms of recognition awarded him in his early years were a U.S. Award at the International Poetry Forum in 1976 for his first collection of poems, The Elements of San Joaquin; a Guggenheim fellowship from 1979 to 1980; and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in 1981 and 1991. He first published ‘‘Oranges’’ in his 1985 poetry collection Black Hair.

Gary Soto (AP Images)

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Gary Soto was born in Fresno, California, on April 12, 1952. His grandparents were born in Mexico and came to California to work in the booming agricultural industry of the San Joaquin Valley. His father picked grapes for the Sunmaid Raisin Company and his mother worked in potato fields. When Soto was five, his father was killed in an industrial accident at work, and his mother raised Gary, his older brother, and his younger sister on her own. Soto attended public schools in Fresno and was admittedly a poor student, graduating from Roosevelt High School with a low ‘‘C’’ average. He started reading in high school though, and more importantly, that is where he began thinking like a poet. After graduating from Roosevelt in 1970, he went to Fresno City College for a short time before transferring to California State University—Fresno. He graduated magna cum laude from California State in 1974 with a bachelor of arts degree and then went on to earn his master of fine arts in Creative Writing at University of California—Irvine in 1976. While in graduate school he married Carolyn Sadako Oda; they had one daughter, Mariko Heidi, who grew up to be a veterinarian.

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As Soto’s reputation as a poet grew, he also published several books of memoirs, relating what childhood in the San Joaquin Valley was like for the son of immigrants. These memoirs include Living Up the Street (1985), Small Faces (1986), Lesser Evils: Ten Quartets (1988), and A Summer Life (1990). His memories of his childhood led him to writing for children and he has become an acclaimed author in the field of children’s literature, starting with the 1990 publication of Baseball in April and Other Stories. His works for children range from picture books for young children to short story and poem collections geared for young adults. In 1992 he stopped teaching to devote all of his energies to his prolific writing career.

POEM SUMMARY Stanza 1 ‘‘Oranges’’ begins with a narrator looking back at his childhood. He remembers a particular experience of walking side by side with a girl. All that readers know about the two characters in this poem is that he is twelve years old at the time of its events, and that she is presumably twelve or near that. When the poem begins, the narrator is alone, having not reached the girl’s house yet. In the third and fourth lines, the speaker introduces the oranges that are referred to in the title of the poem. There are two of them, and the boy is on his way to pick up his date, so readers might infer that he means to share the oranges with the girl. They are not represented here as something positive, though, but rather as a burden. In addition, he allows his focus to stray

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look appealing. She has a bright, happy face, and he smiles, and in line 16 the narrator makes a point of mentioning that he touched her on the shoulder, a significant enough gesture to mention, though nothing is made of it.

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS Soto reads his poem ‘‘Oranges’’ and discusses his interpretation of it in Seeing Anew: Rhetorical Figures in Poetry, a videotape released by Maryland Public Television in 1992.  Soto maintains a Web site at http://www.gary soto.com that includes descriptions of his works and thoughts about his life. 

from the poem’s main situation, his first experience with a girl, and instead makes a point of dwelling on the cold weather. Lines 5 through 7 offer readers a graphic, sensory description of the cold of the day that had been referred to earlier. Soto’s description of frost on the ground and breath condensing as it is exhaled indicates that it may have been an unusual cold snap, as most of his poems are autobiographical and take place in Fresno, California, where he grew up: the average temperature in Fresno barely touches the freezing mark at night in December. The fact that the weather was strangely colder than usual could account in part for the prominent place it has in the speaker’s memory. Lines 8 through 12 show the young protagonist approaching the house of the girl he is to go walking with. Though he has never been out with her before, he knows her house well, having looked at it in the night and in the day, familiar with the porch light that burns continuously. Almost as foreboding as the cold weather is the fact that her dog barks at the boy; readers can assume that the barking dog is hers because she comes out of the house in response to its noise, with no mention of the boy knocking or ringing a doorbell. The fact that this is no casual meeting, but a prearranged date, is indicated in line 13 by the fact that the girl comes to the boy when she sees him. The fact that it is a date is implied in line 15 by the fact that she has taken the time to apply makeup to her face, wanting to make herself

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Lines 17 through 21 describe the neighborhood that they walk through together. It is a commercial area that has a used car lot that twelve-year-olds would feel comfortable cutting through, and it is a conscientious enough community to have recently planted new trees in an effort toward civic beautification. In lines 22 through 24, the poem describes the feel of the old time drugstore that they enter. The bell rings when the door is opened so that whoever is working there, involved in other things, can know when a customer has entered the shop. The saleslady is a matronly woman who approaches her customers with individual care and attention. The narrow aisles indicate an emphasis on stocking products, without the kind of savvy attention to customer psychology that goes into organizing modern shops. The boy’s grand gesture in lines 25 through 27 is obviously the fulfillment of what he has been planning all along. He gestures to the candy display, offering to buy whichever candy she picks. Though it is never explicitly addressed, readers can infer that these two young people live in poverty. For one thing, the girl reacts with glee to an offer of a candy bar in lines 28 through 30, implying that she does not have much chance to purchase any candy for herself. The most obvious indicator of their depressed situation, however, is the fact that the boy does not even have the price of a candy bar in his pocket; he only has a nickel, while the candy bar she chooses costs a dime (lines 31–33). In lines 34 through 38, the boy quickly thinks of a way to deal with the embarrassing situation of having offered to buy the girl a candy bar but not having enough to pay for it. He does not object, or draw attention to his poverty. Instead, he approaches the woman who is running the store and silently offers her a deal, offering her half of the price of the candy and one of the two oranges that he brought along to share with the girl. One of the most significant actions in this poem occurs in lines 38 through 43. The boy and the saleslady establish eye contact across the

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candy bar, nickel, and orange that he has put on the counter. From the look in his eyes, she can tell why he is not offering her the correct price of the candy he wishes to buy, and why it is so very important to him to buy that candy without being embarrassed. Soto does not even bother to tell readers that the woman allowed him to pay half the price of the candy with an orange, leaving readers instead to understand that his offer has been accepted from the empathy that develops between the boy and the salesclerk.

Stanza 2 The second stanza starts on line 43 with one word, indented, to give readers a sense that more than the setting has changed: the mood of the poem has changed, too, as the boy and the girl have reached a new point in their relationship, with a new closeness. While the first stanza emphasized the coldness outside when the boy was walking alone, the descriptions in the second stanza, lines 44–46, show that the day has warmed a little bit: the hiss of the cars as they pass on the street shows that the frost that once crunched beneath the boy’s feet has melted, and the fog that hangs in the air would not be possible if the weather were below freezing. In lines 47 and 48, the boy takes hold of the girl’s hand. She does not object, but still he does not hold it for long, letting go in line 49 after only two blocks. He knows that she accepts him, but that the chocolate that he has bought her is very important to her as well. The last six lines of the poem, lines 51–56, contain an extended description of the orange that the boy peels as the girl is unwrapping her chocolate bar. Soto does not explicitly describe what makes it so special; that much is made clear through the events that preceded this moment, with the boy bringing an orange for the girl he likes and the salesclerk accepting the orange as payment. Instead, the poem leaves reader with a visual image. The brightness of the orange is contrasted with the grayness of the dark, cool day, and then it is described as looking from afar like a fire in the boy’s hand. Since the connotations of fire, in this context, are all positive, readers are left feeling that the boy’s outing with the girl has warmed and enlightened him, and that the one orange left is an emblem of the special feeling that came over him that day.

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THEMES Coming of Age ‘‘Oranges’’ is the story of a twelve-year-old boy who is crossing an emotional threshold and entering into a new period of his life, facing things that he has never encountered before. This is made clear in the first few words of the poem. The fact that he has never walked with a girl until the events related here indicates to readers that they are about to witness something that will change his life. In doing something for the first time ever, especially in entering into his first adult relationship, the boy is gaining some aspect of maturity. A literary work about a young person who is entering into a phase of adulthood that he or she has never experienced before is referred to as a coming-of-age story. Such tales often end with the protagonist losing his or her idealism, though as ‘‘Oranges’’ shows, this is not always the case. In this poem, the narrator does pass over from being inexperienced with the opposite sex to feeling comfortable in a relationship with a girl. He does not acquire the cynicism that is often associated with a loss of innocence. If anything, the way that his walk with the girl turns out makes the boy more trusting of life and its possibilities than he was before. Though writers often use coming-of-age stories to introduce characters to the crushing responsibilities of adulthood, Soto uses ‘‘Oranges’’ to show that growing and learning can lead to a sense of wonder.

Empathy The dramatic tension of this story derives from the fact that the boy finds his desires in conflict with his means. He wants to impress the girl by buying her whatever she wants, but the chocolate she chooses costs twice what he can afford. It is a situation that could end tragically, leaving the boy humiliated and cynical about women, but instead Soto shows the boy making a tacit agreement with the woman he is supposed to pay, offering her an orange for half the price of the candy bar. No words pass between them about this deal. He does not have to explain his situation; it is clear. She sees the young people together and she knows what the boy is trying to do when he buys the candy bar, just as she knows, from the fact that he has done what he can to make up the missing money with what he

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does have—an orange—that he does not want to cheat the store. She is able to understand how he feels so thoroughly that she falls into an unspoken conspiracy with him, helping him keep the girl unaware that her choice of candy is a burden to him. Soto shows that empathy, the ability to understand the emotions of another person, is one of the most important human emotions